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SELECTED 
LITERARY ESSAYS 

FROM 

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

WITH INTRODUCTION BY 

WILL DAVID HOWE 

Professor of English in Indiana Uni-vtrsity 

and 
K 

NORMAN FOERSTER 

Associate Professor of English in the Uni-versity 
of North Carolina 




BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 



-fm 



■3 !" 

1^4 



COPYRIGHT, I9I4, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

R. L. S. 236 



SEP 21 1914 



Kht %iber«Rie $retl« 

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 

©CI,A380460 



CONTENTS 

INTRODUCTION 

I. Lowell's Life and Personality ... v 
n. Lowell as a Literary Critic . . . ix 

SELECTED ESSAYS 

Chaucer (excerpt) i 

^ Milton (excerpt) 20 

Dryden 44 

Pope (excerpt) 154 

Wordsworth (excerpt) 201 

Carlyle 228 

Emerson the Lecturer 276 

Thoreau 290 



INTRODUCTION 



I. LOWELL S LIFE AND PERSONALITY 

*'One is sometimes asked by young men to recom- 
mend to them a course of reading. My advice would 
always be to confine yourself to the supreme books in 
whatever literature ; still better, to choose one great 
author and grow thoroughly familiar with him. For 
as all roads lead to Rome, so they all likewise lead 
hence; and you will find that in order to understand 
perfectly and weigh exactly any really vital piece of 
literature, you will be gradually and pleasantly per- 
suaded to studies and explorations of which you little 
dreamed when you began and will find yourselves schol- 
ars before you are aware." 

Thus spoke Lowell, the reader, professor, and man 
of letters. This was his advice in his day and serves 
as well in our time, when there are so many books 
and so few good readers. How well he followed his 
own teaching may be seen by watching him grow 
from early childhood to advanced maturity. His life 
was one long search for the " supreme books," one 
quest for a deeper familiarity with the " really vital 
pieces of literature." 

James Russell Lowell was born in Cambridge within 
the shadow of Harvard University at a time when 
America was breaking the soil for a new intellectual 
and spiritual life. In his veins flowed the blood of one 



vi INTRODUCTION 

of the best New England families, mingled with the 
romantic Celtic strain of his mother, a descendant from 
the Spence family which liked to trace its ancestry 
back to the old hero, Sir Patrick Spens. From the 
lips of his mother, Lowell listened with delight to the 
reciting and singing of the old ballads. In his father's 
library he was surrounded by books which had been 
gathered through many years by a family that read the 
best that New England could afford. 

He completed the course at Harvard. He won lit- 
tle distinction as a scholar in the classroom, but was 
developed exceptionally by his " browsing " among the 
volumes of the library. If we glance at the list of 
books which he drew from the library in his college 
days, we observe the same eagerness which character- 
ized the enthusiastic reader of later years. There was 
in him something of the curiosity which in the period 
of the European Renaissance inspired men to discover 
the books of the classic past just as our pioneer fore- 
fathers gave their lives to the discovery of new lands 
and new riches. Lowell was always led by this same 
romantic curiosity in his wandering in " the realms of 
gold." 

Having come to the end of his college course, 
young Lowell tried to find himself in the professions 
of law and medicine and in business, but the old love 
of books ever drew him on. Happily for him he re- 
solved to make a new start by writing verse. At this 
time Maria White came into his life, an unusual 
young woman of strong radical mind who encouraged 
him in his idealism. Under her sympathetic inspira- 
tion he wrote his first poetry which showed a serious- 



INTRODUCTION vii 

ness of purpose and a sincere devotion to the best 
ideals of his country. So began the career of Lowell 
the poet. 

In 1855 he was appointed to the professorship of 
Belles-Lettres at Harvard, to the same chair which 
had been occupied with distinction by Ticknor and 
Longfellow. While serving the University he was 
first selected to be Minister to Spain and later ad- 
vanced to the Court of St. James. All these positions 
he filled with marked success. During this span of 
thirty ^years (1855 ^^ 1885) it was possible for him to 
devote himself to his reading and to inspire young 
students with an enthusiasm for great books and to 
mingle with men of letters who read widely and sym- 
pathetically. He was able to develop and cherish a 
taste and appreciation of the great literatures to a de- 
gree which is rare among men. 

In every way in which Lowell expressed himself 
he was the same likable man of fine sense and of 
genuine virility. In his excellent biography of Lowell, 
Mr. Greenslet writes : " Lowell had a way of utter- 
ing a good thing in talk, then jotting it down in his 
notebook, then writing it to a correspondent, and 
then using it, a little filed and polished, in whatever 
he happened to be composing at the time. One has 
in consequence a marked sense of parallelism in 
thought and phrase in the three modes of his prose ex- 
pression." His lectures to his students at Harvard, 
his letters to his many friends, his political and literary 
essays, all reflected delightfully the same human in- 
terest which made him a likable man. Leslie Stephen 
once wrote of his " unmixed kindliness arjd thorough 



viii INTRODUCTION 

wholesomeness of nature." The better we know him 
the more we like him. His common sense, whimsical 
humor, genuine interest in affairs of the day, his un- 
daunted faith in men, — these saved him from mere 
bookishness. He was too human, too much a social 
being to be a recluse. That he knew the world at its 
best and cherished the highest ideals for his country, 
our people learned when they trusted to him the most 
delicate diplomatic questions in Madrid and in London. 

The volumes bearing the titles Among my Books^ My 
Study Windows^ Literary Essays^ contain his more for- 
mal criticism on the reading which ran through his 
life. These titles are characteristic of their author. 
Lowell read good books, talked about good books, 
wrote to his friends about good books, inspired his 
students to read good books, and has left us the best 
things said in America about ,the good books of the 
world literatures. He read widely, preferring the au- 
thors of modern literature rather than those of classic 
times. He liked to read authors through with the pur- 
pose of discovering the unity in their work. Thus 
he found that Carlyle fell short of being a very great 
author because he did not reveal this unity; Dante 
was one of the greatest writers because his work was 
a perfect reflection of the man himself. So he was al- 
ways reading books from the human point of view. 

It was fortunate for America in the middle of the nine- 
teenth century that our leading university was repre- 
sented by a teacher who was so thoroughly American 
in all his political and literary ideals, who set for him- 
self the task of interesting the young nation in the great 
authors of literature, and not by one who exalted the 



INTRODUCTION ix 

ephemeral literature of his own country chiefly because 
it was American. Nor was he interested in mere tech- 
nique or in any timely or bizarre expression. He was 
content to point to the great lights whose shining had 
not grown dim with the centuries. Dante, Chaucer, 
Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Lessing, 
Rousseau, Carlyle, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, 
and Emerson, — these were the writers who had made 
literature, and literature stood to him as the " great ex- 
ponent of a^l that was permanent in the human spirit." 
No one could go far astray who inspired his readers 
to know more of these masters. 

In the passing years as we come to look upon Frank- 
lin, Emerson, Whittier, Lincoln, Whitman, Mark 
Twain, and others as representing in this way or in that 
way the spirit of America, we shall not soon forget the 
lasting service rendered to our higher life by the ideal- 
ism of our most distinguished American man of letters. 

II. LOWELL AS A LITERARY CRITIC 

In a letter to Miss Barrett, Robert Browning re- 
ferred, with just amusement, to "the very air of a 
Columbus " that Lowell betrayed in his earliest criti- 
cal writing. This naivete, though it diminished as Low- 
ell's faculties ripened, was always characteristic of his 
criticism, and is, indeed, one of its main charms. To 
his countrymen, who were in Lowell's day flushed with 
the surprise and excitement of their share of the Ro- 
mantic Movement, Lowell was a Columbus, because 
the literatures of the Old World, which he more than 
any other brought within their ken, were to them vir- 



X INTRODUCTION 

tually a New World of delight and inspiration. He was 
the foremost critic and humanist of our New England 
Renaissance; he wrote for those who had little, if any, 
acquaintance with either critical traditions or the poets 
and dramatists who to him were the brightest of the 
fixed stars. With a boundless enthusiasm for the finest 
things in literature, and with hardly a rival in the field of 
interpretative criticism, he made an extraordinary im- 
pression upon his own and the succeeding generation. 
Historically, his criticism is of the first importance. 

But to his readers in the twentieth century, Lowell's 
criticism depends, for its interest and value, on its ab- 
solute excellences; we shall find it preferable to study, 
not so much its historic significance as its merits and 
demerits as literary criticism. 

What strikes us from beginning to end in the read- 
ing of Lowell's writing on literature is the fact that it 
is primarily the criticism, not of a literary critic, but 
of an insatiable and excellent reader. He read inces- 
santly; his library at Elmwood was a place consecrated 
to communion with the highest minds of literature. 
He knew the classics, and read fluently French, Ger- 
man, Spanish, and Italian. Dante, Cervantes, Calde- 
ron, Chaucer, and Shakespeare he studied untiringly. 
He could read for incredible stretches of hours, and he 
carried the literary point of view with him wherever 
he went. He responded immediately and abundantly 
to excellence wherever he found it ; with an unerring 
instinct he could find the delectable spots in the uneven 
fields of Dryden and the correct gardens of Pope, and 
like Lamb, he could relish a book that the uncharit- 
able world pronounced stupid. Though he wrote. 



INTRODUCTION xi 

" Books are good dry forage ; we can keep alive on 
them ; but, after all, men are the only fresh pasture" ; 
and though in practice he was never the mere book- 
worm, he unquestionably suffered from what De Quin- 
cey called "the gluttony of books." In "A Moose- 
head Journal," he remarked, "how tyrannical the habit 
of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape think- 
ing." There is an instructive relation between his 
manner of writing a critical essay and the result. He 
annotated ^s he read, for lecture-room purposes ; it was 
his habit, he tells us more than once, to review all that 
a man wrote just before criticizing his work, and while 
re-reading, he doubtless annotated more amply; then 
he gathered and elaborated his material, and presto ! an 
essay was ready for the public. The processes of re- 
flection, of arrangement of material, and of develop- 
ment of ideas had but scant attraction for him ; in one 
of his commonplace books is this characteristic entry : 
*''Tis only while we are forming our opinions that we 
are very anxious to propagate them." As a consequence, 
his essays are sometimes perfunctory, and, but for his 
irrepressible cleverness and his intermittent response 
to the demands of the subject, some of them would 
have been dull. He was first of all a reader, an enjoyer 
of books : he was almost — to use an epithet that he 
bestowed upon Cotton Mather — " book-sufFocated." 
His mind, though alert, was not by nature reflective. 
He had no insistent desire to search for standards of 
criticism or life; his writing, rich in many ways, is 
poor in ideas; he is not interested in points of view, 
in hilltop surveys, but rather in the engaging or imagin- 
atively startling detail. 



xii INTRODUCTION 

Lowell's criticism, then, is quite unphilosophic ; is, 
indeed, little more than so much random comment. 
But what comment! how diverting, and pungent, and 
healthy, and true, and human, and (on occasion) sol- 
emnizing! If he wanted the poise, the symmetry, and 
the unity of purpose characteristic of Arnold (of whom 
he wrote, " clear and cold as a critique of Matt Ar- 
nold's "), if he was too rarely " clear and cold " him- 
self, he made up for his defects in a fashion by writing 
with a warmth, a never-failing gusto, and sometimes 
a veneration, that are communicated to the reader by 
the contagion of a large nature. His view of the art 
of criticism — '' the higher wisdom of criticism lies in 
the capacity to admire" — is the one-sided romantic 
view which the better critics of our own day have wisely 
abjured; but whatever we may think of the view, 
Lowell was surely a noble exemplar of it, partly be- 
cause his admiration was almost uniformly deserved 
by its object, and partly because he could admire greatly 
as well as profusely. 

It is significant that Lowell's best critical essays, 
such as the " Chaucer," or " Shakespeare Once More," 
or the extended study of " Dante," deal with the 
greatest writers. They put him on his mettle, evoked 
in its fulness that power of wise admiration and sym- 
pathy which needed to be roused if he was to do his 
best writing. The " Dante " essay, which to some of 
its readers seems disappointing as the result of twenty 
years' intimate study, is, whatever its shortcomings, 
written in an atmosphere of calm spiritual elevation 
which many more original and speculative critics never 
breathe, and which Lowell himself rarely breathed 



INTRODUCTION xiii 

unless in the company of serene spirits. Here is a typi- 
cal passage: — 

" Dante's ideal of life, the enlightening and strength- 
ening of that native instinct of the soul which leads 
it to strive backward toward its divine source, may 
sublimate the senses till each becomes a window for 
the light of truth and the splendor of God to shine 
through. In him as in Calderon the perpetual presence 
of imagination not only glorifies the philosophy of life 
and the science of theology, but idealizes both in symbols 
of material beauty. Though Dante's conception of 
the highest end of man was that he should climb 
through every phase of human experience to that tran- 
scendental and supersensual region where the true, the 
good, and the beautiful blend in the white light of God, 
yet the prism of his imagination forever resolved the 
ray into color again, and he loved to show it also 
where, entangled and obstructed in matter, it became 
beautiful once more to the eye of sense." 

The invariable tokens of genius which Lowell found 
in Dante and Shakespeare as well as in Homer and 
iEschylus were, first, " fatally-chosen words," sec- 
ondly, " the simplicity of consummate art," thirdly, 
an " harmonious whole," and fourthly, a " happy 
mixture and proportion " of the qualities of artistic 
work (imagination, the most important, supported by 
its "less showy and more substantial allies"). Al- 
though he nowhere brings together these various 
essentials of great art, and although the first two 
seemed to mean more to him than the second two, one 
is doubtless justified in saying that these are almost 
constantly the bases for his critical opinions. When, 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

for example, in the essay on Carlyle, he speaks of 
Goethe as " the last of the great poets," the charac- 
teristics of genius mentioned above are implied in the 
epithet he italicizes. 

These traits of the highest type of art are obvi- 
ously found more frequently in the classical literatures 
of Greece and Rome than in modern literatures, so 
that one might expect Lowell's sympathies to lie with 
the former rather than the latter. But Lowell had not 
the classical spirit — he preferred painting to sculp- 
ture, the mediaeval cathedral to the Greek temple, and 
in general Gothic art to classic art. His favorite poets 
were not Homer, Sophocles, and Virgil, but, no doubt, 
Dante, Shakespeare, and Calderon. It is true that in 
his address on " The Study of Modern Languages " 
the undertone is one of instinctive allegiance — partly 
conventional and partly personal — to the ancient 
literatures ; but in this address he seems to be combat- 
ing, as he did rather often, a " secret partiality." His 
list of the illustrious writers in " the literature of the 
last three centuries" — Dante, Machiavelli, Mon- 
taigne, Bacon, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Pascal, Cal- 
deron, Lessing, and Goethe — contains more names 
that were dear to him than would any list of ten clas- 
sical writers. In the Battle of the Books he would 
probably have fought lustily for the cause of the an- 
cients, yet one suspects that his heart would have 
been with the moderns. 

But this is not to say that Lowell's sympathies 
were with romanticism. Petrarch he usually credits 
with being the inventor of " romance and sentiment — 
in other words, the pretense of feeling what we do not 



INTRODUCTION xv 

feel," and as Petrarch's followers he includes Rous- 
seau, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Byron, — in fact, 
almost all who come after Rousseau in point of time. 
It is true that Lowell himself, in his youth, passed 
through a period of romantic melancholy, and to the end, 
one cannot help feeling, nursed in secret a wild spark 
of romance which he would neither fan into flame nor 
forcibly quench. It may be fanciful to suppose that 
this is why he was attracted to Dryden and wrote so 
well about him — Dryden, whose poetical enthusiasm 
was chilled, as Lowell pointed out, by the skeptical 
atmosphere of his age. At all events, Lowell was but 
ill at ease in the currents of thought that prevailed in 
the nineteenth century. Despite his Tory nature, he 
welcomed the spirit and doctrine of democracy bravely ; 
but evolutionary science (" I hate it," he wrote in a 
letter, " as a savage does writing ") and the introspec- 
tion of romanticism (the " melancholy liver-complaint " 
of" our self-exploiting nineteenth century ") perplexed 
him sorely, and caused him to seek, with the more 
earnestness, the hearty good-fellowship of Chaucer and 
the serene presence of Shakespeare. 

What Lowell lost in his criticism through allowing 
it to be random comment, he well-nigh made up 
through his astonishing power of expression. What- 
ever entered his mind, this he expressed or could ex- 
press. His literary essays and his classroom talk are 
qf a piece, so that what Professor Barrett Wendell, 
one of his pupils in the famous Dante course, says of 
his talk applies well enough to his essays : " Now and 
again, some word or some passage would suggest to 
him a line of thought — sometimes very earnest, some- 



xvi INTRODUCTION 

times paradoxically comical — that it would never 
have suggested to any one else. And he w^ould lean 
back in his chair, and talk away across country till he 
felt like stopping ; or he would thrust his hands into 
the pockets of his rather shabby sack-coat, and pace 
the end of the room with his heavy laced boots, and 
look at nothing in particular, and discourse of things 
in general." Those hours in the course on Dante 
many men still living carry about with them as an im- 
perishable possession. What made them memorable is 
mainly Lowell's character, Lowell the man, from 
whom it would be hard to separate the fertility and 
readiness and aptness of his power of expression. His 
pages, like his talk, are sprinkled with engaging turns 
of phrase, quotable epigrams, figures of extraordinary 
" patness," and all these are borne on a swift current 
of speech that deepens and darkens here and sparkles 
over pebbles there, but that never recognizes impedi- 
ment. 

To watch for the clever phrases and passages while 
one is carried forward rapidly by the irresistible tide 
of his style, is perhaps not the most elevating pursuit 
conceivable, but it has an excuse in the excellent 
quality of Lowell's cleverness. There are two kinds 
of cleverness : the first, cheap cleverness, bears the 
relation to the second, genuine cleverness, which 
melodrama bears to tragedy. Just as melodrama ofi^ers 
thrills for their own sake, while the thrills of tragedy 
are inevitable, so cheap cleverness delights in produc- 
ing clever effects, while genuine cleverness produces 
them because it cannot help it. Lowell's cleverness is 
of the latter kind ; his happy expressions give one the 



INTRODUCTION xvii 

feeling that they came unsought, that they arranged 
themselves spontaneously. Here are a few from the 
first volume of his collected prose works : — 

"... one of those naked pigs that seem rushing 
out of market-doors in winter, frozen in a ghastly at- 
titude of gallop." 

[Of the dramatist Webster ;] " His nature had 
something of the sleuth-hound quality in it, and a plot, 
to keep his mind eager on the trail, must be sprinkled 
with fresh blood at every turn. ... He has not the 
condensing power of Shakespeare, who squeezed mean- 
ing into a phrase with an hydraulic press, but he could 
carve a cherry-stone with any of the concettisti. . . ." 

[Of Emerson :] "His eye for a fine, telling phrase 
that will carry true is like that of a backwoodsman 
for a rifle; and he will dredge you up a choice word 
from the mud of Cotton Mather himself." His dic- 
tion "is like homespun cloth-of-gold." Of a dis- 
jointed lecture : " It was as if, after vainly trying to get 
his paragraphs into sequence and order, he had at last 
tried the desperate expedient of shuffling them. It was 
chaos come again, but it was a chaos full of shooting- 
stars. . . ." 

Such things as those — and one could find still bet- 
ter examples in the other volumes — would repay the 
reading of many a pedestrian page, if there were any 
such in Lowell. But there are not. First of all, his 
writing is entertaining — one can read him in the 
most languid hour ; secondly, it is inspiring. If the en- 
tertainment is ere long forgotten, the inspiration, hav- 
ing recruited our spiritual faculties, abides indefinitely. 

Since Lowell's death, and the death of many of 



xviii INTRODUCTION 

those who came under the spell of his charming and 
vigorous personality, his reputation as a literary critic 
has suffered a slight decline. The decline was inevi- 
table, since in his later years he was somewhat over- 
rated, and since until a few years ago no one had 
undertaken to expose his unquestionably grave defects 
as a literary critic. Now that his defects — his lack of 
plan and of purpose, in particular — are clearly under- 
stood, we may dwell upon his excellences, and be 
grateful for them, without danger of exaggeration. As 
rambling essays on literature rather than deliberate 
critical estimates, they are among the few of their 
kind in the whole range of English literature that have 
survived, and they may confidently be expected to 
outlive the more orderly, more solid, but less impres- 
sive works of critics whom only critics care to read. 
Generous, brilliant, and wise, his conversations on 
literature will ever be our resort when our own un- 
aided light seems dim and unprofitable. 



LITERARY ESSAYS 



CHAUCER 

1870 

** And ay the more he was in despair 
The more he coveted and thought her fair; 
His blinde lust was all his coveting. 
On morrow when the bird began to sing 
Unto the siege he cometh full privily 
And by himself he walketh soberly 
The image of her recording alway new: 
Thus lay her hair, and thus fresh was her hue. 
Thus sate, thus spake, thus span, this was her cheer. 
Thus fair she was, and this was her manere. 
All this conceit his heart hath new ytake. 
And as the sea, with tempest all toshake. 
That after, when the storm is all ago. 
Yet will the water quap a day or two. 
Right so, though that her forme were absent 
The pleasance of her forme was present." 



THIS passage leads me to say a few 
words of Chaucer as a descriptive 
poet; for I think it a great mistake 
to attribute to him any properly dramatic 
power, as some have done. Even Herr 



2 CHAUCER 

Hertzberg, in his remarkably intelligent essay-j 
is led a little astray on this point by his enthu- 
siasm. Chaucer is a great narrative poet ; and, 
in this species of poetry, though the author's 
personality should never be obtruded, it yet 
unconsciously pervades the whole, and commu- 
nicates an individual quality, — a kind of flavor 
of its own. This very quality, and it is one of 
the highest in its way and place, would be fatal 
to all dramatic force. The narrative poet is oc- 
cupied with his characters as picture, with their 
grouping, even their costume, it may be, and he 
feels for and with them instead of being they 
for the moment, as the dramatist must always 
be. The story-teller must possess the situation 
perfectly in all its details, while the imagination 
of the dramatist must be possessed and mastered 
by it. The latter puts before us the very pas- 
sion or emotion itself in its utmost intensity ; 
the former gives them, not in their primary 
form, but in that derivative one which they 
have acquired by passing through his own mind 
and being modified by his reflection. The deep- 
est pathos of the drama, like the quiet " no 
more but so ? " with which Shakespeare tells us 
that Ophelia's heart is bursting, is sudden as a 
stab, while in narrative it is more or less suf- 
fused with pity, — a feeling capable of prolonged 
sustention. This presence of the author's own 
sympathy is noticeable in all Chaucer's pathetic 



CHAUCER 3 

passages, as, for instance, in the lamentation of 
Constance over her child in the " Man of Law's 
Tale." When he comes to the sorrow of his 
story, he seems to croon over his thoughts, to 
soothe them and dwell upon them with a kind 
of pleased compassion, as a child treats a wounded 
bird which he fears to grasp too tightly, and yet 
cannot make up his heart wholly to let go. It 
is true also of his humor that it pervades his 
comic tales like sunshine, and never dazzles the 
attention by a sudden flash. Sometimes he 
brings it in parenthetically, and insinuates a 
sarcasm so slyly as almost to slip by without our 
notice, as where he satirizes provincialism by the 
cock who 

** By nature knew ech ascensioun 
Of equinoxial in thilke toun. ' * 

Sometimes he turns round upon himself and 
smiles at a trip he has made into fine writing : — 

** Till that the brighte sun had lost his hue. 
For th' orisont had reft the sun his light 
(This is as much to sayen as «it was night *)." 

Nay, sometimes it twinkles roguishly through 
his very tears, as in the 

** * Why wouldest thou be dead,' these women cry, 
* Thou haddest gold enough — and Emily? ' " — 

that follows so close upon the profoundly ten- 
der despair of Arcite's farewell : — 



4 CHAUCER 

** What is this world ? What asken men to have ? 
Now with his love now in the colde grave 
Alone vvithouten any company !" 

The power of diffusion without being diffuse 
would seem to be the highest merit of narration, 
giving it that easy flow which is so delightful. 
Chaucer's descriptive style is remarkable for its 
lowness of tone, — for that combination of en- 
ergy with simplicity which is among the rarest 
gifts in literature. Perhaps all is said in saying 
that he has style at all, for that consists mainly 
in the absence of undue emphasis and exaggera- 
tion, in the clear uniform pitch which penetrates 
our interest and retains it, where mere loudness 
would only disturb and irritate. 

Not that Chaucer cannot be intense, too, on 
occasion ; but it is with a quiet intensity of his 
own, that comes in as it were by accident. 

*' Upon a thicke palfrey, paper-white. 

With saddle red embroidered with delight. 
Sits Dido: 

And she is fair as is the brighte morrow 
That healeth sicke folk of nightes sorrow. 
Upon a courser startling as the fire, 
^neas sits." 

Pandarus, looking at Troilus, — 

*'Took up a light and found his countenance 
As for to look upon an old romance." 



CHAUCER S 

With Chaucer it is always the thing itself and 
not the description of it that is the main object. 
His picturesque bits are incidental to the story, 
glimpsed in passing ; they never stop the way. 
His key is so low that his high lights are never 
obtrusive. His imitators, like Leigh Hunt, and 
Keats in his " Endymion," missing the nice gra- 
dation with which the master toned everything 
down, become streaky. Hogarth, who reminds 
one of him in the variety and natural action of 
his figures, is like him also in the subdued bril- 
liancy of his coloring. When Chaucer condenses, 
it is because his conception is vivid. He does 
not need to personify Revenge, for personifica- 
tion is but the subterfuge of unimaginative and 
professional poets ; but he embodies the very 
passion itself in a verse that makes us glance 
over our shoulder as if we heard a stealthy tread 
behind us : — 

*♦ The smilcr with the knife hid under the cloak." ' 

And yet how unlike is the operation of the im- 
aginative faculty in him and Shakespeare ! When 
the latter describes, his epithets imply always 
an impression on the moral sense (so to speak) 
of the person who hears or sees. The sun " flat- 
ters the mountain-tops with sovereign eye " ; 
the bending "weeds lacquey the dull stream"; 

* Compare this with the Mumbo-Jumbo Revenge in Col- 
lins's Ode. 



6 CHAUCER 

the shadow of the falcon " coucheth the fowl 
below " ; the smoke is " helpless " ; when Tar- 
quin enters the chamber of Lucrece " the thresh- 
old grates the door to have him heard." His 
outward sense is merely a window through which 
the metaphysical eye looks forth, and his mind 
passes over at once from the simple sensation 
to the complex meaning of it, — feels with the 
object instead of merely feeling it. His imagina- 
tion is forever dramatizing. Chaucer gives only 
the direct impression made on the eye or ear. 
He was the first great poet who really loved 
outward nature as the source of conscious plea- 
surable emotion. The Troubadour hailed the 
return of spring ; but with him it was a piece 
of empty ritualism, Chaucer took a true delight 
in the new green of the leaves and the return 
of singing birds, — a delight as simple as that 
of Robin Hood: — 

*• In summer when the shaws be sheen. 
And leaves be large and long. 
It is full merry in fair forest 

To hear the small birds' song." 

He has never so much as heard of the " burthen 
and the mystery of all this unintelligible world." 
His flowers and trees and birds have never both- 
ered themselves with Spinoza. He himself sings 
more like a bird than any other poet, because 
it never occurred to him, as to Goethe, that he 
ought to do so. He pours himself out in sin- 



CHAUCER 7 

cere joy and thankfulness. When we compare 
Spenser's imitations of him with the original 
passages, we feel that the delight of the later 
poet was more in the expression than in the 
thing itself. Nature with him is only good to 
be transfigured by art. We walk among Chau- 
cer's sights and sounds ; we listen to Spenser's 
musical reproduction of them. In the same way, 
the pleasure which Chaucer takes in telling his 
stories has in itself the effect of consummate 
skill, and makes us follow all the windings of 
his fancy with sympathetic interest. His best 
tales run on like one of our inland rivers, some- 
times hastening a little and turning upon them- 
selves in eddies that dimple without retarding 
the current ; sometimes loitering smoothly, 
while here and there a quiet thought, a tender 
feeling, a pleasant image, a golden-hearted verse, 
opens quietly as a water-lily, to float on the sur- 
face without breaking it into ripple. The vulgar 
intellectual palate hankers after the titillation of 
foaming phrase, and thinks nothing good for 
much that does not go off with a pop like a 
champagne cork. The mellow suavity of more 
precious vintages seems insipid : but the taste, 
in proportion as it refines, learns to appreciate 
the indefinable flavor, too subtile for analysis. 
A manner has prevailed of late in which every 
other word seems to be underscored as in a 
school-girl's letter. The poet seems intent on 



8 CHAUCER 

showing his sinew, as if the power of the slim 
Apollo lay in the girth of his biceps. Force for 
the mere sake of force ends like Milo, caught 
and held mockingly fast by the recoil of the log- 
he undertook to rive. In the race of fame, there 
are a score capable of brilliant spurts for one 
who comes in winner after a steady pull with 
wind and muscle to spare. Chaucer never shows 
any signs of effort, and it is a main proof of his 
excellence that he can be so inadequately sam- 
pled by detached passages, — by single lines 
taken away from the connection in which they 
contribute to the general effect. He has that 
continuity of thought, that evenly prolonged 
power, and that delightful equanimity, which 
characterize the higher orders of mind. There 
is something in him of the disinterestedness that 
made the Greeks masters in art. His phrase is 
never importunate. His simplicity is that of 
elegance, not of poverty. The quiet unconcern 
with which he says his best things is peculiar to 
him among English poets, though Goldsmith, 
Addison, and Thackeray have approached it in 
prose. He prattles inadvertently away, and all 
the while, like the princess in the story, lets fall 
a pearl at every other word. It is such a piece 
of good luck to be natural ! It is the good gift 
which the fairy godmother brings to her prime 
favorites in the cradle. If not genius, it alone 
is what makes genius amiable in the arts. If a 



CHAUCER 9 

man have it not, he will never find it, for when 
it is sought it is gone. 

When Chaucer describes anything, it is com- 
monly by one of those simple and obvious epi- 
thets or qualities that are so easy to miss. Is it 
a woman? He tells us she is fresh; that she 
has glad eyes ; that " every day her beauty 
newed " ; that 

•♦ Methought all fellowship as naked 
Withouten her that I saw once. 
As a corone without the stones." 

Sometimes he describes amply by the merest 
hint, as where the Friar, before setting himself 
softly down, drives away the cat. We know 
without need of more words that he has chosen 
the snuggest corner. I n some of his early poems 
he sometimes, it is true, falls into the catalogue 
style of his contemporaries; but after he had 
found his genius he never particularizes too 
much, — a process as deadly to all effect as an 
explanation to a pun. The first stanza of the 
" Clerk's Tale " gives us a landscape whose 
stately choice of objects shows a skill in com- 
position worthy of Claude, the last artist who 
painted nature epically : — 

** There is at the west ende of Itaile, 
Down at the foot of Vesulus the cold, 
A lusty plain abundant of vitaile, 
Where many a tower and town thou may'st behold 
That founded were in time of fathers old. 



iG CHAUCER 

And many another delitable sight; 
And Saluces this noble country hight.'* 

The Pre-Raphaelite style of landscape en- 
tangles the eye among the obtrusive weeds and 
grass-blades of the foreground which, in look- 
ing at a real bit of scenery, we overlook ; but 
what a sweep of vision is here ! and what happy 
generalization in the sixth verse as the poet turns 
away to the business of his story ! The whole 
is full of open air. 

But it is in his characters, especially, that his 
manner is large and free ; for he is painting 
history, though with the fidehty of portrait. He 
brings out strongly the essential traits, char- 
acteristic of the genius rather than of the indi- 
vidual. The Merchant who keeps so steady a 
countenance that 

** There wist no wight that he was e'er in debt," — 

the Sergeant at Law, " who seemed busier than 
he was," the Doctor of Medicine, whose " study 
was but little on the Bible," — in all these cases 
it is the type and not the personage that fixes 
his attention. William Blake says truly, though 
he expresses his meaning somewhat clumsily, 
" the characters of Chaucer's Pilgrims are the 
characters which compose all ages and nations. 
Some of the names and titles are altered by time, 
but the characters remain forever unaltered, and 
consequently they are the physiognomies and 



CHAUCER M 

lineaments of universal human life,beyond which 
Nature never steps. Names alter, things never 
alter. As Newton numbered the stars, and as 
Linnaeus numbered the plants, so Chaucer num- 
bered the classes of men." In his outside acces- 
sories, it is true, he sometimes seems as minute 
as if he were illuminating a missal. Nothing 
escapes his sure eye for the picturesque, — the 
cut of the beard, the soil of armor on the buff 
jerkin, the rust on the sword, the expression of 
the eye. But in this he has an artistic purpose. 
It is here that he individualizes, and, while every 
touch harmonizes with and seems to complete 
the moral features of the character, makes us 
feel that we are among living men, and not 
the abstracted images of men. Crabbe adds 
particular to particular, scattering rather than 
deepening the impression of reality, and making 
us feel as if every man were a species by him- 
self; but Chaucer, never forgetting the essential 
sameness of human nature, makes it possible, 
and even probable, that his motley characters 
should meet on a common footing, while he 
gives to each the expression that belongs to him, 
the result of special circumstance or training. 
Indeed, the absence of any suggestion of caste 
cannot fail to strike any reader familiar with the 
literature on which he is supposed to have formed 
himself. No characters are at once so broadly 
human and so definitely outlined as his. Belong- 



12 CHAUCER 

ing, some of them, to extinct types, they con- 
tinue contemporary and famihar forever. So 
wide is the difference between knowing a great 
many men and that knowledge of human nature 
which comes of sympathetic insight and not of 
observation alone. 

It is this power of sympathy which makes 
Chaucer's satire so kindly, — more so, one is 
tempted to say, than the panegyric of Pope. 
Intellectual satire gets its force from personal 
or moral antipathy, and measures offences by 
some rigid conventional standard. Its mouth 
waters over a galling word, and it loves to say 
I'hoUy pointing out its victim to public scorn. 
Indignatio facit versus^ it boasts, though they 
might as often be fathered on envy or hatred. 
But imaginative satire, warmed through and 
through with the genial leaven of humor, smiles 
half sadly and murmurs IVe. Chaucer either 
makes one knave betray another, through a 
natural jealousy of competition, or else expose 
himself with a naivete of good-humored cyni- 
cism which amuses rather than disgusts. In the 
former case the butt has a kind of claim on 
our sympathy; in the latter, it seems nothing 
strange, as I have already said, if the sunny at- 
mosphere which floods that road to Canterbury 
should tempt anybody to throw off one disguise 
after another without suspicion. With perfect 
tact, too, the Host is made the choragus in this 



CHAUCER 13 

diverse company, and the coarse jollity of his 
temperament explains, if it do not excuse, much 
that would otherwise seem out of keeping. Surely 
nobody need have any scruples with him. 

Chaucer seems to me to have been one of the 
most purely original of poets, as much so in 
respect of the world that is about us as Dante 
in respect of that which is within us. There had 
been nothing like him before, there has been 
nothing since. He is original, not in the sense 
that he thinks and says what nobody ever thought 
and said before, and what nobody can ever think 
and say again, but because he is always natural, 
because, if not always absolutely new, he is al- 
ways delightfully fresh, because he sets before 
us the world as it honestly appeared to Geoffrey 
Chaucer, and not a world as it seemed proper 
to certain people that it ought to appear. He 
found that the poetry which had preceded him 
had been first the expression of individual feel- 
ing, then of class feeling as the vehicle of legend 
and history, and at last had well-nigh lost itself 
in chasing the mirage of allegory. Literature 
seemed to have passed through the natural 
stages which at regular intervals bring it to de- 
cline. Even the lyrics of the jongleurs were all 
run in one mould, and the Pastourelles of North- 
ern France had become as artificial as the Pasto- 
rals of Pope. The Romances of chivalry had 
been made over into prose, and the " Melusine " 



14 CHAUCER 

of his contemporary Jehan d' Arras is the for- 
lorn hope of the modern novel. Arrived thus 
far in their decrepitude, the monks endeavored 
to give them a religious and moral turn by alle- 
gorizing them. Their process reminds one of 
something Ulloa tells us of the fashion in which 
the Spaniards converted the Mexicans : " Here 
we found an old man in a cavern so extremely 
aged as it was wonderful, which could neither 
see nor go because he was so lame and crooked. 
The Father, Friar Raimund, said it were good 
(seeing he was so aged) to make him a Chris- 
tian ; whereupon we baptized him." The monks 
found the Romances in the same stage of senil- 
ity, and gave them a saving sprinkle with the 
holy water of allegory. Perhaps they were only 
trying to turn the enemy's own weapons against 
himself, for it was the free-thinking " Romance 
of the Rose " that more than anything else had 
made allegory fashionable. Plutarch tells us 
that an allegory is to say one thing where an- 
other is meant, and this might have been need- 
ful for the personal security of Jean de Meung, 
as afterwards for that of his successor, Rabelais. 
But, except as a means of evading the fagot, the 
method has few recommendations. It reverses 
the true office of poetry by making the real un- 
real. It is imagination endeavoring to recom- 
mend itself to the understanding by means of 
cuts. If an author be in such deadly earnest, 



CHAUCER I? 

or if his imagination be of such creative vigor 
as to project real figures when it meant to cast 
only a shadow upon vapor ; if the true spirit 
come, at once obsequious and terrible, when the 
conjurer has drawn his circle and gone through 
with his incantations merely to produce a proper 
frame of mind in his audience, as was the case 
with Dante, there is no longer any question of 
allegory as the word and thing are commonly 
understood. But with all secondary poets, as 
with Spenser for example, the allegory does not 
become of one substance with the poetry, but 
is a kind of carven frame for it, whose figures 
lose their meaning, as they cease to be contem- 
porary. It was not a style that could have much 
attraction for a nature so sensitive to the actual, 
so observant of it, so interested by it, as that 
of Chaucer. He seems to have tried his hand 
at all the forms in vogue, and to have arrived 
in his old age at the truth, essential to all really 
great poetry, that his own instincts were his 
safest guides, that there is nothing deeper in 
life than life itself, and that to conjure an alle- 
gorical significance into it was to lose sight of 
its real meaning. He of all men could not say 
one thing and mean another, unless by way of 
humorous contrast. 

In thus turning frankly and gayly to the ac- 
tual world, and drinking inspiration from sources 
open to all; in turning away from a colorless 



i6 CHAUCER 

abstraction to the solid earth and to emotions 
common to every pulse; in discovering that to 
make the best of Nature, and not to grope 
vaguely after something better than Nature, was 
the true office of Art; in insisting on a definite 
purpose, on veracity, cheerfulness, and simplic- 
ity, Chaucer shows himself the true father and 
founder of what is characteristically English lit- 
erature. He has a hatred of cant as hearty as 
Dr. Johnson's, though he has a slier way of 
showing it; he has the placid common sense of 
Franklin, the sweet, grave humor of Addison, 
the exquisite taste of Gray ; but the whole tex- 
ture of his mind, though its substance seem 
plain and grave, shows itself at every turn iri- 
descent with poetic feeling like shot silk. Above 
all, he has an eye for character that seems to 
have caught at once not only its mental and 
physical features, but even its expression in 
variety of costume, — an eye, indeed, second 
only, if it should be called second in some 
respects, to that of Shakespeare. 

I know of nothing that may be compared 
with the Prologue to the " Canterbury Tales," 
and with that to the story of the " Chanon's 
Yeoman " before Chaucer. Characters and por- 
traits from real life had never been drawn 
with such discrimination, or with such variety, 
never with such bold precision of outline, and 
with such a lively sense of the picturesque. 



CHAUCER 17 

His Parson is still unmatched, though Dryden 
and Goldsmith have both tried their hands in 
emulation of him. And the humor also in its 
suavity, its perpetual presence and its shy 
unobtrusiveness, is something wholly new in 
literature. For anything that deserves to be 
called like it in English we must wait for 
Henry Fielding. 

Chaucer is the first great poet who has treated 
To-day as if it were as good as Yesterday, the 
first who held up a mirror to contemporary 
life in its infinite variety of high and low, of 
humor and pathos. But he reflected life in its 
large sense as the life of men, from the knight 
to the ploughman, — the life of every day as it 
is made up of that curious compound of human 
nature with manners. The very form of the 
"Canterbury Tales" was imaginative. The gar- 
den of Boccaccio, the supper-party of Grazzini, 
and the voyage of Giraldi make a good enough 
thread for their stories, but exclude all save 
equals and friends, exclude consequently human 
nature in its wider meaning. But by choosing 
a pilgrimage, Chaucer puts us on a plane where 
all men are equal, with souls to be saved, and 
with another world in view that abolishes all 
distinctions. By this choice, and by making 
the Host of the Tabard always the central 
figure, he has happily united the two most famil- 
iar emblems of life, — the short journey and 



i8 CHAUCER 

the inn. We find more and more as we study 
him that he rises quietly from the conventional 
to the universal, and may fairly take his place 
with Homer in virtue of the breadth of his hu- 
manity. 

In spite of some external stains, which those 
who have studied the influence of manners will 
easily account for without imputing them to any 
moral depravity, we feel that we can join the 
pure-minded Spenser in calling him "most sa- 
cred, happy spirit." If character may be divined 
from works, he was a good man, genial, sincere, 
hearty, temperate of mind, more wise, perhaps, 
for this world than the next, but thoroughly 
humane, and friendly with God and men. I 
know not how to sum up what we feel about 
him better than by saying (what would have 
pleased most one who was indifferent to fame) 
that we love him more even than we admire. 
We are sure that here was a true brother-man 
so kindly that, in his House of Fame, after 
naming the great poets, he throws in a pleasant 
word for the oat^n-pipes 

'* Of the little herd-grooms 
That keepen beasts among the brooms." 

No better inscription can be written on the first 
page of his works than that which he places over 
the gate in his Assembly of Fowls, and which 
contrasts so sweetly with the stern lines of Dante 
from which they were imitated : — 



CHAUCER 19 

** Through me men go into the blissful place 
Of the heart's heal and deadly woundes' cure; 
Through me men go unto the well of Grace, 
Where green and lusty May doth ever endure; 
This is the way to all good aventure; 
Be glad, thou Reader, and thy sorrow offcast. 
All open am I, pass in, and speed thee fast ! " 



MILTON' 

1872 

MILTON was a harmonist rather than a 
melodist. There are, no doubt, some 
exquisite melodies (like the "Sabrina 
Fair") among his earlier poems, as could hardly 
fail to be the case in an age which produced or 
trained the authors of our best English glees, 
as ravishing in their instinctive felicity as the 
songs of our dramatists, but he also showed 
from the first that larger style which was to be 
his peculiar distinction. The strain heard in 
the " Nativity Ode," in the " Solemn Music," 
and in " Lycidas," is of a higher mood, as re- 
gards metrical construction, than anything that 

' The Life of John MiIto?i : narrated in Connection with 
the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time. 
By David Masson, M.A., LL.D., Professor of Rhetoric and 
English Literature in the University of Edinburgh. Vols, i., 
ii, 1638-1643. London and New York: Macmillan & Co. 
1 87 1., 8vo, pp. xii, 608. 

The Poetical Works of John Milton, edited, with Intro- 
duction, Notes, and an Essay on Milton's English, by David 
Masson, M.A., LL.D., Professor of Rhetoric and English 
Literature in the University of Edinburgh. 3 vols. Svo. 
Macmillan & Co. 1874. 



MILTON 2 1 

had thrilled the English ear before, giving no 
uncertain augury of him who was to show what 
sonorous metal lay silent till he touched the 
keys in the epical organ-pipes of our various 
language, that have never since felt the strain 
of such prevailing breath. It was in the larger 
movements of metre that Milton was great and 
original. I have spoken elsewhere of Spenser's 
fondness for dilation as respects thoughts and 
images. In Milton it extends to the language 
also, and often to the single words of which a 
period is composed. He loved phrases of tower- 
ing port, in which every member dilated stands 
like Teneriffe or Atlas. In those poems and 
passages that stamp him great, the verses do 
not dance interweaving to soft Lydian airs, but 
march rather with resounding tread and clang 
of martial music. It is true that he is cunning 
in alliterations, so scattering them that they tell 
in his orchestra without being obvious, but it 
is in the more scientific region of open-voweled 
assonances which seem to proffer rhyme and yet 
withhold it (rhyme-wraiths one might call them), 
that he is an artist and a master. He even some- 
times introduces rhyme with misleading intervals 
between and unobviously in his blank verse : — 

*' There rest, if any rest can harbour there ; 
And, reassembling our afflicted powers. 
Consult how we may henceforth most offend 
Our enemy, our own loss how repair, 
. How overcome this dire calamity. 



22 MILTON 

What reinforcement we may gain from hope. 
If not, what resolution from des/i^/r." ' 

There is one almost perfect quatrain, — 

** Before thy fellows, ambitious to win 
From me some plume, that thy success may show 
Destruction to the rest. This pause between 
(Unanswered lest thou boast) to let thee know "; — 

and another hardly less so, of a rhyme and an 

assonance, — 

** If once they hear that voice, their liveliest pledge 
Of hope in fears and dangers, heard so oft 
In worst extremes and on the perilous edge 
Of battle when it raged, in all assaults." 

There can be little doubt that the rhymes in 
the first passage cited were intentional, and per- 
haps they were so in the others; but Milton's 
ear has tolerated not a few perfectly rhyming 
couplets, and others in which the assonance 
almost becomes rhyme, certainly a fault in blank 
verse : — 

•' From the Asian Kings (and Parthian among these). 
From India and the Golden Chersonese"; 

"That soon refreshed him wearied, and repaired 
What hunger, if aught hunger, had impaired"; 

*♦ And will alike be punished, whether thou 
Reign or reign not, though to that gentle brow ' ' ; 

* I think Coleridge's nice ear would have blamed the near- 
ness of enemy and calamity in this passage. Mr. Masson 
leaves out the comma after If not, the pause of which is need- 
ful, I think, to the sense, and certainly to keep not a little 
farther apart from what, (" teach each " !) 



MILTON 23 

*♦ Of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy. 
Save what is in destroying, other joy "; 

" Shall all be Paradise, far happier place 
Than this of Eden, and far happier days "; 

♦* This my long sufferance and my day of grace 
They who neglect and scorn shall never taste"; 

*' So far remote with diminution seen. 
First in his East the glorious lamp was seen." ' 

These examples (and others might be adduced) 
serve to show that Milton's ear was too busy 
about the larger interests of his measures to be 
always careful of the lesser. He was a strategist 
rather than a drill-sergeant in verse, capable, 
beyond any other English poet, of putting great 
masses through the most complicated evolutions 
without clash or confusion, but he was not curi- 
ous that every foot should be at the same angle. 
In reading " Paradise Lost " one has a feeling 
of vastness. You float under an illimitable sky, 
brimmed with sunshine or hung with constella- 
tions ; the abysses of space are about you ; you 
hear the cadenced surges of an unseen ocean ; 
thunders mutter round the horizon ; and if the 
scene change, iti-s with an elemental movement 
like the shifting of mighty winds. His imagina- 
tion seldom condenses, like Shakespeare's, in 
the kindling flash of a single epithet, but loves 
better to diffuse itself. Witness his descriptions, 

' •* First in his East," is not soothing to the ear. 



24 MILTON 

wherein he seems to circle like an eagle bathing 
in the blue streams of air, controlling with his 
eye broad sweeps of champaign or of sea, and 
rarely fulmining in the sudden swoop of intenser 
expression. He was fonder of the vague, perhaps 
I should rather say the indefinite, where more 
is meant than meets the ear, than any other of 
our poets. He loved epithets (like old 2.ndfar) 
that suggest great reaches, whether of space or 
time. This bias shows itself already in his 
earlier poems, as where he hears 

** The_/^r off cwrkw sound 
Over some widewatered shore," 

or where he fancies the shores and sounding 
seas washing Lycidas far away ; but it reaches 
its climax in the " Paradise Lost." He pro- 
duces his effects by dilating our imaginations 
with an impalpable hint rather than by concen- 
trating them upon too precise particulars. Thus 
in a famous comparison of his, the fleet has no 
definite port, but plies stemming nightly toward 
the pole in a wide ocean of conjecture. He gen- 
eralizes always instead of specifying, — the true 
secret of the ideal treatment in which he is with- 
out peer, and, though everywhere grandiose, he 
is never turgid. Tasso begins finely with 

•' Chiama gli abitator dell' ombre eterne 
II rauco suon della tartarea tromba; 
Treman le spaziose atre caverne. 
El' aer cieco a quel rumor rimbomba," 



MILTON 25 

but soon spoils all by condescending to definite 
comparisons with thunder and intestinal convul- 
sions of the earth ; in other words, he is unwary 
enough to give us a standard of measurement, 
and the moment you furnish Imagination with 
a yardstick she abdicates in favor of her statis- 
tical poor-relation Commonplace. Milton, with 
this passage in his memory, is too wise to ham- 
per himself with any statement for which he 
can be brought to book, but wraps himself in a 
mist of looming indefiniteness ; — 

*' He called so loud that all the hollow deep 
Of hell resounded; " 

thus amplifying more nobly by abstention from 
his usual method of prolonged evolution. No 
caverns, however spacious, will serve his turn, 
because they have limits. He could practise this 
self-denial when his artistic sense found it need- 
ful, whether for variety of verse or for the greater 
intensity of effect to be gained by abruptness. 
His more elaborate passages have the multitu- 
dinous roll of thunder, dying away to gather a 
sullen force again from its own reverberations, 
but he knew that the attention is recalled and 
arrested by those claps that stop short without 
echo and leave us listening. There are no such 
vistas and avenues of verse as his. In reading 
the " Paradise Lost" one has a feeling of spa- 
ciousness such as no other poet gives. Milton's 
respect for himself and for his own mind and 



26 MILTON 

its movements rises well-nigh to veneration. He 
prepares the way for his thought and spreads on 
the ground before the sacred feet of his verse 
tapestries inwoven with figures of mythology 
and romance. There is no such unfailing dignity 
as his. Observe at what a reverent distance he 
begins when he is about to speak of himself, as 
at the beginning of the Third Book and the 
Seventh. His sustained strength is especially 
felt in his beginnings. He seems always to start 
full-sail ; the wind and tide always serve; there 
is never any fluttering of the canvas. In this he 
off^ers a striking contrast with Wordsworth, who 
has to go through with a great deal o{ yo-heave- 
ohing before he gets under way. And though, 
in the didactic parts of " Paradise Lost," the 
wind dies away sometimes, there is a long swell 
that will not let us forget it, and ever and anon 
some eminent verse lifts its long ridge above its 
tamer peers heaped with stormy memories. And 
the poem never becomes incoherent ; we feel all 
through it, as in the symphonies of Beethoven, 
a great controlling reason in whose safe-conduct 
we trust implicitly. 

Mr. Masson's discussions of Milton's Eng- 
lish are, it seems to me, for the most part un- 
satisfactory. He occupies some ten pages, for 
example, with a history of the genitival form its, 
which adds nothing to our previous knowledge 
on the subject and which has no relation to 



MILTON 27 

Milton except for its bearing on the author- 
ship of some verses attributed to him against 
the most overwhehning internal evidence to the 
contrary. Mr. Masson is altogether too reso- 
lute to find traces of what he calls oddly enough 
" recollectiveness of Latin constructions " in 
Milton, and scents them sometimes in what 
would seem to the uninstructed reader very 
idiomatic English. More than once, at least, 
he has fancied them by misunderstanding the 
passage in which they seem to occur. Thus, 
in "Paradise Lost," xi. 520, 511, — 

'* Therefore so abject is their punishment. 

Disfiguring not God's likeness but their own," — 

has no analogy with eorum deformantium^ for the 
context shows that it is the ■punishment which 
disfigures. Indeed, Mr. Masson so often finds 
constructions difficult, ellipses strange, and words 
needing annotation that are common to all 
poetry, nay, sometimes to all English, that his 
notes seem not seldom to have been written by 
a foreigner. On this passage in " Comus," — 

** I do not think my sister so to seek 
Or so unprincipled in virtue's book 
And the sweet peace that virtue bosoms ever 
As that the single want of light and noise 
(Not being in danger, as I trust she is not) 
Could stir the constant mood of her calm thoughts," 

Mr. Masson tells us, that " in very strict con- 



28 MILTON 

struction, not being would cling to want as its 
substantive ; but the phrase passes for the Latin 
ablative absolute." Soon i\\Q \^ or ds forestalling 
nighty " i. e. anticipating. Forestall is literally to 
anticipate the market by purchasing goods be- 
fore they are brought to the stall." In the verse 

" Thou hast immanacled while Heaven sees good," 

he explains that " while here has the sense o( so 
long as.'' But Mr. Masson's notes on the lan- 
guage are his weakest. He is careful to tell us, 
for example, " that there are instances of the use 
of shine as a substantive in Spenser, Ben Jonson, 
and other poets." It is but another way of spell- 
ing sheen^ and if Mr. Masson never heard a 
shoeblack in the street say, " Shall I give you 
a shine, sir?" his experience has been singular. 
His notes in general are very good (though too 
long). Those on the astronomy of Milton are 
particularly valuable. I think he is sometimes 
a little too scornful of parallel passages,' for if 
there is one thing more striking than another 
in this poet, it is that his great and original im- 
agination was almost wholly nourished by books, 
perhaps I should rather say set in motion by 

' A passage from Dante (^Inferno, xi. 96-105), with its 
reference to Aristotle, would have given him the meaning of 
•' Nature taught art," which seems to puzzle him. A study 
of Dante and of his earlier commentators would also Lave beer 
of great service in the astronomical notes. 



MILTON 29 

them. It is wonderful how, from the most 
withered and juiceless hint gathered in his read- 
ing, his grand images rise like an exhalation ; 
how from the most battered old lamp caught in 
that huge drag-net with which he swept the 
waters of learning, he could conjure a tall genius 
to build his palaces. Whatever he touches swells 
and towers. That wonderful passage in " Co- 
mus " of the airy tongues, perhaps the most 
imaginative in suggestion he ever wrote, was 
conjured out of a dry sentence in Purchas's ab- 
stract of Marco Polo. Such examples help us 
to understand the poet. When I find that Sir 
Thomas Browne had said before Milton, that 
Adam "was the wisest of all men since,'' I am 
glad tofind this link between the most profound 
and the most stately imagination of that age. 
Such parallels sometimes give a hint also of 
the historical development of our poetry, of 
its apostolical succession, so to speak. Every 
one has noticed Milton's fondness of sonorous 
proper names, which have not only an acquired 
imagmative value by association, and so serve 
to awaken our poetic sensibilities, but have 
likewise a merely musical significance. This he 
probably caught from Marlowe, traces of whom 
are frequent in him. There is certainly some- 
thing of what afterwards came to be called Mil- 
tonic in more than one passage of " Tambur- 
iaine," a play in which gigantic force seems 



30 MILTON 

struggling from the block, as in Michael Angelo's 
Dawn. 

Mr. Masson's remarks on the versification 
of Milton are, in the main, judicious, but when 
he ventures on particulars, one cannot always 
agree with him. He seems to understand that 
our prosody is accentual merely, and yet, when 
he comes to what he calls variations, he talks of 
the "substitution of the Trochee, the Pyrrhic, or 
the Spondee, for the regular Iambus, or of the 
Anapsest, the Dactyl, the Tribrach, etc., for the 
same." This is always misleading. The shift 
of the accent in what Mr. Masson calls " dis- 
syllabic variations " is common to all pentameter 
verse, and, in the other case, most of the words 
cited as trisyllables either were not so in Milton's 
day,' or were so or not at choice of the poet, ac- 
cording to their place in the verse. There is not 
an elision of Milton's without precedent in the 
dramatists from whom he learned to write blank 
verse. Milton was a greater metrist than any of 
them, except Marlowe and Shakespeare, and he 
employed the elision (or the slur) oftener than 
they to give a faint undulation or retardation to 
his verse, only because his epic form demanded 

' Almost every combination of two vowels might in those 
days be a diphthong or not, at will. Milton's practice of ehsion 
was confirmed and sometimes (perhaps) modified by his study 
of the Italians, with whose usage in this respect he closely 
conforms. 



MILTON 31 

it more for variety's sake. How Milton would 
have read them, is another question. He cer- 
tainly often marked them by an apostrophe 
in his manuscripts. He doubtless composed 
according to quantity, so far as that is possible 
in English, and as Cowper somewhat extrava- 
gantly says, " gives almost as many proofs of it 
in his * Paradise Lost ' as there are lines in the 
poem." ' But when Mr. Masson tells us that 

" Self-fed and self-consumed; if this fail," 

and 

** Dwells in all Heaven charity so rare," 
are " only nine syllables," and that in 

** Created hugest that swim the ocean- stream," 

" either the third foot must be read as an ana- 
f<£st or the word hugest must be pronounced 
as one syllable, hug sty' I think Milton would 
have invoked the soul of Sir John Cheek. Of 
course Milton read it 

** Created hugest that swim th' ocean-stream," — ■ 

just as he wrote (if we may trust Mr. Mas- 
son's facsimile) 

"Thus sang the uncouth swain to th* oaks and rills," — 

a verse in which both hiatus and elision occur 
precisely as in the Italian poets.^ " Gest that 

' Letter to Rev. W. Bagot, 4th January, 1791. 

* So Dante: — 

" Ma sapienza e amore e virtute." 

So Donne: — 

" Simony and sodomy in churchmen's lives." 



32 MILTON 

swim " would be rather a knotty anapast^ an 
insupportable foot indeed ! And why is even 
hug st worse than Shakespeare's 

♦* Toung^ st follower of thy drum " ? 

In the same way he says of 

«* For we have also our evening and our morn," 

that " the metre of this line is irregular," and 
of the rapidly fine 

" Came flying and in mid air aloud thus cried,' 

that it is " a line of unusual metre." Why more 
unusual than 

** As being the contrary to his high will " ? 

What would Mr. Masson say to these three 
verses from Dekkar ? — 

** And knowing so much, I muse thou art so poor "; 

*' I fan away the ^\is,tjiytng in mine eyes "; 

** Flowing o'er with court news only of you and them." 

All such participles (where no consonant di- 
vided the vowels) were normally of one sylla- 
ble, permissibly of two.' If Mr. Masson had 
studied the poets who preceded Milton as he 

' Mr. Masson is evidently not very familiar at first hand 
with the versification to which Milton's youthful ear had been 
trained, but seems to have learned something from Abbott's 
Shakespearian Grammar in the interval between writing his 
notes and his Introduction. Walker's Shakespeare' s Versifica- 
tion would have been a great help to him in default of original 
knowledge. 



MILTON 33 

has studied hiniy he would never have said that 
the verse — 

** Not this rock only; his omnipresence fills " — 

was " peculiar as having a distinct syllable of 
over-measure." He retains Milton's spelling 
of hunderd without perceiving the metrical rea- 
son for It, that d^ /, />, b, etc., followed by / or r, 
might be either of two or of three syllables. In 
Marlowe we find it both ways in two consecu- 
tive verses : — 

*' A hundred [hundered] and fifty thousand horse. 
Two hundred thousand foot, brave men at arms." ' 

Mr. Masson is especially puzzled by verses 
ending in one or more unaccented syllables, and 
even argues In his Introduction that some of 
them might be reckoned Alexandrines. He 
cites some lines of Spenser as confirming his 
theory, forgetting that rhyme wholly changes 
the conditions of the case by throwing the ac- 
cent (appreciably even now, but more emphatic- 
ally in Spenser's day) on the last syllable. 
** A spirit and judgment equal or superior," 

he calls " a remarkably anomalous line, consist- 
ing of twelve or even thirteen syllables." Surely 
Milton's ear would never have tolerated a dis- 

' Milton has a verse in Comus where the e is elided from 
the word sister by its preceding a vowel: — 

" Heaven keep my sister ! again, again, and near ! " 

This would have been impossible before a consonant. 



34 MILTON 

syllabic " spirit " in such a position. The word 
was then more commonly of one syllable, though 
it might be two, and was accordingly spelt spreet 
(still surviving in sprite)^ sprit ^ and even spirt ^ as 
Milton himself spells it in one of Mr. Masson's 
facsimiles.' Shakespeare, in the verse 

** Hath put a spirit of youth in everything," 

uses the word admirably well in a position where 
it cannot have a metrical value of more than one 
syllable, while it gives a dancing movement to 
the verse in keeping with the sense. Our old 
metrists were careful of elasticity, a quality 
which modern verse has lost in proportion as 
our language has stiffened into uniformity under 
the benumbing fingers of pedants. 

This discussion of the value of syllables is not 
so trifling as it seems. A great deal of nonsense 
has been written about imperfect measures in 
Shakespeare, and of the admirable dramatic ef- 
fect produced by filling up the gaps of missing 
syllables with pauses or prolongations of the 
voice in reading. In rapid, abrupt, and pas- 
sionate dialogue this is possible, but in passages 
of continuously level speech it is barbarously 
absurd. I do not believe that any of our old 
dramatists has knowingly left us a single im- 
perfect verse. Seeing in what a haphazard way 

' So spirito and spirto in Italian, esperis and espirs in Old 
French. 



MILTON 35 

and in how mutilated a form their plays have 
mostly reached us, we should attribute such 
faults (as a geologist would call them) to any- 
thing rather than to the deliberate design of the 
poets. Marlowe and Shakespeare, the two best 
metrists among them, have given us a standard 
by which to measure what licenses they took in 
versification, — the one in his translations, the 
other in his poems. The unmanageable verses 
in Milton are very few, and all of them occur in 
works printed after his blindness had lessened 
the chances of supervision and increased those 
of error. There are only two, indeed, which 
seem to me wholly indigestible as they stand. 
These are, 

** Burnt after them to the bottomless pit," 

and y^ y- ^ 

** With them from bliss to the bottomless deep." 

This certainly looks like a case where a word 
had dropped out or had been stricken out by 
some proof-reader who limited the number of 
syllables in a pentameter verse by that of his 
finger-ends. Mr. Masson notices only the first 
of these lines, and says that to make it regular 
by accenting the word bottomless on the second 
syllable would be " too horrible." Certainly not, 
if Milton so accented it, any more than blasphe- 
mous and twenty more which sound oddly to us 
now. However that may be, Milton could not 



36 MILTON 

have intended to close not only a period, but a 
paragraph also, with an unmusical verse, and in 
the only other passage where the word occurs 
it is accented as now on the first syllable: — 

*' With hideous ruin and combustion down 
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell." 

As bottom is a word which, like bosom and besom^ 
may be monosyllabic or dissyllabic according 
to circumstances, I am persuaded that the last 
passage quoted (and all three refer to the same 
event) gives us the word wanting in the two 
others, and that Milton wrote, or meant to 
write, 

*' Burnt after them down to the bottomless pit," 

which leaves in the verse precisely the kind of 
ripple that Milton liked best.' 

Much of what Mr. Masson says in his Intro- 
duction of the way in which the verses of Mil- 
ton should be read is judicious enough, though 
some of the examples he gives, of the "com- 
icality " which would ensue from compressing 
every verse into an exact measure often sylla- 
bles, are based on a surprising ignorance of the 

* Milton, however, would not have balked at M' bottom- 
less any more than Drayton at th' rejected or Donne at tK 
sea. Mr. Masson does not seem to understand this elision, for 
he corrects /' tJi' midst to ;* the midst, and takes pains to men- 
tion it in a note. He might better have restored the 7i in /', 
where it is no contraction, but merely indicates the pronunci- 
ation, as ff' for o/'and on. 

V 



MILTON 37 

laws which guided our poets just before and 
during Milton's time in the structure of their 
verses. Thus he seems to think that a strict 
scansion would require us in the verses 

" So he with difficulty and labor hard," 

and 

'* Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold " 

to pronounce diffikty and purp \ Though Mr. 
Masson talks of " slurs and elisions," his ear 
would seem somewhat insensible to their exact 
nature or office. His diffikty supposes a hiatus 
where none is intended, and his making purple 
of one syllable wrecks the whole verse, the real 
slur in the latter case being on azure or.^ When 
he asks whether Milton required " these pro- 
nunciations in his verse," no positive answer 
can be given, but I very much doubt whether 
he would have thought that some of the lines 
Mr. Masson cites "remain perfectly good Blank 
Verse even with the most leisurely natural enun- 
ciation of the spare syllable," and I am sure he 
would have stared if told that " the number of 
accents " in a pentameter verse was " variable." 
It may be doubted whether elisions and com- 
pressions which would be thought in bad taste 
or even vulgar now were more abhorrent to the 
ears of Milton's generation than to a cultivated 

* Exactly analogous to that in treasurer when it is shortened 
to two syllables. 



38 MILTON 

Italian would be the hearing Dante read as prose. 
After all, what Mr. Masson says may be reduced 
to the infallible axiom that poetry should be read 
as poetry. 

Mr. Masson seems to be right in his main 
principles, but the examples he quotes make 
one doubt whether he knows what a verse is. 
For example, he thinks it would be a " horror," 
if in the verse 

♦♦That invincible Samson far renowned," 

we should lay the stress on the first syllable of 
invincible. It is hard to see why this should 
be worse than conventicle or remonstrance or suc- 
cessor or incompatible (the three latter used by the 
correct Daniel), or why Mr. Masson should 
clap an accent on surface merely because it 
comes at the end of a verse, and deny it to in- 
vincible. If one read the verse just cited with 
those that go with it, he will find that the accent 
must come on the first syllable of invincible, or 
else the whole passage becomes chaos.' Should 
we refuse to say obleeged with Pope because the 
fashion has changed ? From its apparently 
greater freedom in skilful hands, blank verse 

' Milton himself has invisible, for we cannot suppose him 
guilty of a verse like 

" Shoots invisible virtue even to the deep," 

while, if read rightly, it has just one of those sweeping elisions 
that he loved. 



MILTON 39 

gives more scope to sciolistic theorizing and 
dogmatism than the rhyming pentameter coup- 
let, but it is safe to say that no verse is good in 
the one that would not be good in the other 
when handled by a master like Dryden, Mil- 
ton, like other great poets, wrote some bad 
verses, and it is wiser to confess that they are so 
than to conjure up some unimaginable reason 
why the reader should accept them as the better 
for their badness. Such a bad verse is 
" Rocks, caves, lakes, _/>»/, bogs, dens and shapes of death," 

which might be cited to illustrate Pope's 

"And ten low words oft creep in one dull line." 

Milton cannot certainly be taxed with any 
partiality for low words. He rather loved them 
tall, as the Prussian King loved men to be six 
feet high in their stockings, and fit to go into 
the grenadiers. He loved them as much for 
their music as for their meaning, — perhaps 
more. His style, therefore, when it has to deal 
with commoner things, is apt to grow a little 
cumbrous and unwieldy. A Persian poet says 
that when the owl would boast, he boasts of 
catching mice at the edge of a hole. Shake- 
speare would have understood this. Milton 
would have made him talk like an eagle. His 
influence is not to be left out of account as par- 
tially contributing to that decline toward poetic 
diction which was already beginning ere he died. 



40 MILTON 

If it would not be fair to say that he is the most 
artistic, he may be called in the highest sense 
the most scientific of our poets. If to Spenser 
younger poets have gone to be sung to, they 
have sat at the feet of Milton to be taught. 
Our language has no finer poem than "Samson 
Agonistes," if any so fine in the quality of au- 
stere dignity or in the skill with which the poet's 
personal experience is generalized into a classic 
tragedy. 

Gentle as Milton's earlier portraits would 
seem to show him, he had in him by nature, or 
bred into him by fate, something of the haughty 
and defiant self-assertion of Dante and Michael 
Angelo. In no other English author is the man 
so large a part of his works. Milton's haughty 
conception of himself enters into all he says 
and does. Always the necessity of this one man 
became that of the whole human race for the 
moment. There were no walls so sacred but 
must go to the ground when he wanted elbow- 
room; and he wanted a great deal. Did Mary 
Powell, the cavalier's daughter, find the abode of 
a roundhead schoolmaster incompatible and leave 
it, forthwith the cry of the universe was for an 
easier dissolution of the marriage covenant. If 
he is bhnd, it is with excess of light, it is a 
divine partiality, an overshadowing with angels' 
wings. Phineus and Teiresias are admitted 
among the prophets because they, too, had lost 



MILTON 41 

their sight, and the bhndness of Homer is of 
more account than his " Iliad." After writing in 
rhyme till he was past fifty, he finds it unsuit- 
able for his epic, and it at once becomes " the 
invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched 
matter and lame metre." If the structure o^ his 
mind be undramatic, why, then, the English 
drama is naught, learned Jonson, sweetest Shake- 
speare, and the rest notwithstanding, and he will 
compose a tragedy on a Greek model with the 
blinded Samson for its hero, and he will com- 
pose it partly in rhyme. Plainly he belongs to 
the intenser kind of men whose yesterdays are 
in no way responsible for their to-morrows. And 
this makes him perennially interesting even to 
those who hate his politics, despise his Socinian- 
ism, and find his greatest poem a bore, A new 
edition of his poems is always welcome, for, as 
he is really great, he presents a fresh side to each 
new student, and Mr. Masson, in his three 
handsome volumes, has given us, with much 
that is superfluous and even erroneous, much 
more that is a solid and permanent acquisition 
to our knowledge. 

It results from the almost scornful withdrawal 
of Milton into the fortress of his absolute per- 
sonality that no great poet is so uniformly self- 
conscious as he. We should say of Shakespeare 
that he had the power of transforming himself 
into everything ; of Milton, that he had that of 



42 MILTON 

transforming everything into himself. Dante is 
individual rather than self-conscious, and he, the 
cast-iron man, grows pliable as a field of grain at 
the breath of Beatrice, and flows away in waves 
of sunshine. But Milton never lets himself go 
for a moment. As other poets are possessed by 
their theme, so is he Jd-^-possessed, his great 
theme being John Milton, and his great duty 
that of interpreter between him and the world. 
I say it with all respect, for he was well worthy 
translation, and it is out of Hebrew that the 
version is made. Pope says he makes God 
the Father reason " like a school-divine." The 
criticism is witty, but inaccurate. He makes 
Deity a mouthpiece for his present theology, and 
had the poem been written a few years later, the 
Almighty would have become more heterodox. 
Since Dante, no one had stood on these visiting 
terms with heaven. 

Now it is precisely this audacity of self-reli- 
ance, I suspect, which goes far toward making 
the sublime, and which, falling by a hair's- 
breadth short thereof, makes the ridiculous. 
Puritanism showed both the strength and weak- 
ness of its prophetic nurture ; enough of the 
latter to be scoffed out of England by the very 
men it had conquered in the field, enough of 
the former to intrench itself in three or four im- 
mortal memories. It has left an abiding mark 
in politics and religion, but its great monuments 



MILTON 43 

are the prose of Bunyan and the verse of Mil- 
ton. It is a high inspiration to be the neighbor 
of great events ; to have been a partaker in them, 
and to have seen noble purposes by their own 
self-confidence become the very means of igno- 
ble ends, if it do not wholly repress, may kindle 
a passion of regret, deepening the song which 
dares not tell the reason of its sorrow. The grand 
loneliness of Milton in his latter years, while it 
makes him the most impressive figure in our 
literary history, is reflected also in his maturer 
poems by a sublime independence of human 
sympathy like that with which mountains fasci- 
nate and rebuff us. But it is idle to talk of the 
loneliness of one the habitual companions of 
whose mind were the Past and Future. I always 
seem to see him leaning in his blindness a hand 
on the shoulder of each, sure that the one will 
guard the song which the other had inspired. 



DRYDEN ' 

1868 

BENVENUTO CELLINI tells us that 
when, in his boyhood, he saw a salaman- 
der come out of the fire, his grandfather 
forthwith gave him a sound beating, that he 
might the better remember so unique a prodigy. 
Though perhaps in this case the rod had 
another application than the autobiographer 
chooses to disclose, and was intended to fix in 
the pupil's mind a lesson of veracity rather than 
of science, the testimony to its mnemonic virtue 
remains. Nay, so universally was it once be- 
lieved that the senses, and through them the 
faculties of observation and retention, were quick- 

' The Dramatuk Works of "John Dryden, Esq. In six 
volumes. London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, in the Strand. 
MDCCxxxv. 1 8mo. 

The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose- Works of "John Dry- 
den, now first collected. With Notes and Illustrations. An 
Account of the Life and Wntings of the Author, grounded on 
Original and Authentick Documents ; and a Collection of his 
Letters, the greatest Part of which has never before been pub- 
lished. By Edmund Malone, Esq. London: T. Cadell and 
W. Davies, in the Strand. 4 vols. 8vo. 

The Poetical Works of John Dryden. (Edited by Mit- 
ford.) London: W. Pickering. 1832. 5 vols. i8mo. 



DRYDEN 45 

ened by an irritation of the cuticle, that in France 
it was customary" to whip the children annually 
at the boundaries of the parish, lest the true place 
of them might ever be lost through neglect of 
so inexpensive a mordant for the memory. From 
this practice the older school of critics should 
seem to have taken a hint for keeping fixed the 
limits of good taste, and what was somewhat 
vaguely called classical Kngl'ish. To mark these 
limits in poetry, they set up as Hermas the im- 
ages they had made to them of Dryden, of Pope, 
and later of Goldsmith. Here they solemnly 
castigated every new aspirant in verse, who in 
turn performed the same function for the next 
generation, thus helping to keep always sacred 
and immovable the ne plus ultra alike of inspira- 
tion and of the vocabulary. Though no two 
natures were ever much more unlike than those 
of Dryden and Pope, and again of Pope and 
Goldsmith, and no two styles, except in such 
externals as could be easily caught and copied, 
yet it was the fashion, down even to the last 
generation, to advise young writers to form them- 
selves, as it was called, on these excellent models. 
Wordsworth himself began in this school ; and 
though there were glimpses, here and there, of 
a direct study of Nature, yet most of the epithets 
in his earlier pieces were of the traditional kind 
so fatal to poetry during great part of the last 
century ; and he indulged in that alphabetic per- 



46 DRYDEN 

sonification which enhvens all such words as 
Hunger, Solitude, Freedom, by the easy magic 
of an initial capital. 

'* Where the green apple shrivels on the spray. 

And pines the unripened pear in summer's kindliest ray. 

Even here Content has fixed her smiling reign 

With Independence, child of high Disdain. 

Exulting 'mid the winter of the skies. 

Shy as the jealous chamois. Freedom flies. 

And often grasps her sword, and often eyes." 

Here we have every characteristic of the artifi- 
cial method (if we except the unconscious alex- 
andrine in the second line), even to the triplet, 
which Swift hated so heartily as " a vicious way 
of rhyming wherewith Mr. Dryden abounded, 
imitated by all the bad versifiers of Charles the 
Second's reign." Wordsworth became, indeed, . 
very early the leader of reform ; but, like Wes- 
ley, he endeavored a reform within the Establish- 
ment. Purifying the substance, he retained the 
outward forms with a feeling rather than convic- 
tion that, in poetry, substance and form are but 
manifestations of the same inward life, the one 
fused into the other in the vivid heat of their 
common expression. Wordsworth could never 
wholly shake off the influence of the century 
into which he was born. He began by propos- 
ing a reform of the ritual, but it went no further 
than an attempt to get rid of the words of Latin 
original where the meaning was as well or better 



DRYDEN 47 

given in derivatives of the Saxon. He would 
have stricken out the " assemble " and left the 
" meet together." Like Wesley, he might be 
compelled by necessity to a breach of the canon ; 
but, like him, he was never a willing schismatic, 
and his singing-robes were the full and flowing 
canonicals of the church by law established. In- 
spiration makes short work with the usage of 
the best authors and with the ready-made ele- 
gances of diction ; but where Wordsworth is not 
possessed by his demon, as Moliere said of Cor- 
neille, he equals Thomson in verbiage, out-Mil- 
tons Milton in artifice of style, and Latinizes 
his diction beyond Dryden. The fact was, that 
he took up his early opinions on instinct, and 
insensibly modified them as he studied the mas- 
ters of what may be called the Middle Period 
of English verse.' As a young man, he dispar- 
aged Virgil (" We talked a great deal of non- 
sense in those days," he said when taken to task 
for it later in life) ; at fifty-nine he translated 
three books of the JEne'id, in emulation of Dry- 
den, though falling far short of him in everything 
but closeness, as he seems, after a few years, to 
have been convinced. Keats was the first reso- 
lute and wilful heretic, the true founder of the 
modern school, which admits no cis-Elizabethan 

' His Character of a Happy Warrior (1806), one of his 
noblest poems, has a dash of Dryden in it, — still more his 
Epistle to Sir George Beaumont (181 1). 



48 DRYDEN 

authority save Milton, whose own English was 
formed upon those earlier models. Keats de- 
nounced the authors of that style which came 
in toward the close of the seventeenth century, 
and reigned absolute through the whole of the 
eighteenth, as 

** A schism. 
Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, 

who went about 
Holding a poor decrepit standard out. 
Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large 
The name of one Boileau! " 

But Keats had never then ' studied the writers 
of whom he speaks so contemptuously, though 
he might have profited by so doing. Boileau 
would at least have taught him th?it flimsy would 
have been an apter epithet for the standard than 
for the mottoes upon it. Dryden was the author 
of that schism against which Keats so vehe- 
mently asserts the claim of the orthodox teach- 
ing it had displaced. He was far more just to 
Boileau, of whom Keats had probably never read 
a word. " If I would only cross the seas," he 
says, " I might find in France a living Horace 
and a Juvenal in the person of the admirable 
Boileau, whose numbers are excellent, whose 
expressions are noble, whose thoughts are just, 
whose language is pure, whose satire is pointed, 
and whose sense is just. What he borrows from 
■ He studied Dryden' s versification before writing his 
Lamia. 



DRYDEN 49 

the ancients he repays with usury of his own, 
in coin as good and almost as universally valu- 
able." ' 

Dryden has now been in his grave nearly a 
hundred and seventy years ; in the second class 
of English poets perhaps no one stands, on the 
whole, so high as he; during his lifetime, in 
spite ofjealousy, detraction, unpopular politics, 
and a suspicious change of faith, his preemi- 
nence was* conceded ; he was the earliest com- 
plete type of the purely literary man, in the 
modern sense ; there is a singular unanimity in 
allowing him a certain claim to greatness which 
would be denied to men as famous and more 
read, — to Pope or Swift, for example ; he is 
supposed, in some way or other, to have re- 
formed English poetry. It is now about half 
a century since the only uniform edition of his 
works was edited by Scott. No library is com- 
plete without him, no name is more familiar 
than his, and yet it may be suspected that few 
writers are more thoroughly buried in that great 
cemetery of the " British Poets." If contempo- 
rary reputation be often deceitful, posthumous 
fame may be generally trusted, for it is a verdict 
made up of the suffrages of the select men in 
succeeding generations. This verdict has been 
as good as unanimous in favor of Dryden. It 

' On the Origin and Progress of Satire. See Johnson's 
counter-opinion in his life of Dryden. 



5° DRYDEN 

is, perhaps, worth while to take a fresh observa- 
tion of him, to consider him neither as warning 
nor example, but to endeavor to make out what 
it is that has given so lofty and firm a position 
to one of the most unequal, inconsistent, and 
faulty writers that ever lived. He is a curious 
example of what we often remark of the Hving, 
but rarely of the dead, — that they get credit 
for what they might be quite as much as for 
what they are, — and posterity has* applied to 
him one of his own rules of criticism, judging 
him by the best rather than the average of his 
achievement, a thing posterity is seldom wont 
to do. On the losing side in politics, it is true 
of his polemical writings as of Burke's, — whom 
in many respects he resembles, and especially 
in that supreme quality of a reasoner, that his 
mind gathers not only heat, but clearness and 
expansion, by its own motion, — that they have 
won his battle for him in the judgment of after 
times. 

To me, looking back at him, he gradually 
becomes a singularly interesting and even pic- 
turesque figure. He is, in more senses than 
one, in language, in turn of thought, in style 
of mind, in the direction of his activity, the first 
of the moderns. He is the first literary man 
who was also a man of the world, as we under- 
stand the term. He succeeded Ben Jonson as 
the acknowledged dictator of wit and criticism, 



DRYDEN 51 

as Dr. Johnson, after nearly the same interval, 
succeeded him. All ages are, in some sense, 
ages of transition ; but there are times when 
the transition is more marked, more rapid ; and 
it is, perhaps, an ill fortune for a man of letters 
to arrive at maturity during such a period, still 
more to represent in himself the change that is 
going on, and to be an efficient cause in bring- 
ing it about. Unless, like Goethe, he be of 
a singularly uncontemporaneous nature, capable 
of being tutta in se romita^ and of running 
parallel with his time rather than being sucked 
into its current, he will be thwarted in that har- 
monious development of native force which has 
so much to do with its steady and successful 
application. Dryden suffered, no doubt, in this 
way. Though in creed he seems to have drifted 
backward in an eddy of the general current ; yet 
of the intellectual movement of the time, so far 
certainly as literature shared in it, he could say, 
with iEneas, not only that he saw, but that him- 
self was a great part of it. That movement was, 
on the whole, a downward one, from faith to 
scepticism, from enthusiasm to cynicism, from 
the imagination to the understanding. It was 
in a direction altogether away from those springs 
of imagination and faith at which they of the 
last age had slaked the thirst or renewed the 
vigor of their souls. Dryden himself recognized 
that indefinable and gregarious influence which 



52 DRYDEN 

\Ye call nowadays the Spirit of the Age, when 
he said that " every Age has a kind of universal 
Genius." ' He had also a just notion of that in 
which he lived ; for he remarks, incidentally, 
that " all knowing ages are naturally sceptic and 
not at all bigoted, which, if I am not much de- 
ceived, is the proper character of our own." ' 
It may be conceived that he was even painfully 
half aware of having fallen upon a time incap- 
able, not merely of a great poet, but perhaps of 
any poet at all ; for nothing is so sensitive 
to the chill of a sceptical atmosphere as that 
enthusiasm which, if it be not genius, is at least 
the beautiful illusion that saves it from the baf- 
fling quibbles of self-consciousness. Thrice un- 
happy he who, born to see things as they might 
be, is schooled by circumstances to see them as 
people say they are, — to read God in a prose 
translation. Such was Dryden's lot, and such, 
for a good part of his days, it was by his own 
choice. He who was of a stature to snatch the 
torch of life that flashes from lifted hand to 
hand along the generations, over the heads 
of inferior men, chose rather to be a link-boy 
to the stews. 

As a writer for the stage, he deliberately 
adopted and repeatedly reaffirmed the maxim 
that 

** He who -lives to please, must please to live." 
* Essay on Dramatick Poesy. ^ Life of Lucian. 



DRYDEN 53 

Without earnest convictions, no great or sound 
literature is conceivable. But if Dry den mostly 
wanted that inspiration which comes of belief 
in and devotion to something nobler and more 
abiding than the present moment and its petu- 
lant need, he had, at least, the next best thing 
to that, — a thorough faith in himself. He was, 
moreover, a man of singularly open soul, and 
of a temper self-confident enough to be candid 
even with himself. His mind was growing to 
the last, his judgment widening and deepening, 
his artistic sense refining itself more and more. 
He confessed his errors, and was not ashamed 
to retrace his steps in search of that better know- 
ledge which the omniscience of superficial study 
had disparaged. Surely an intellect that is still 
pliable at seventy is a phenomenon as interesting 
as it is rare. But at whatever period of his life we 
look at Dryden, and whatever, for the moment, 
may have been his poetic creed, there was some- 
thing in the nature of the man that would not 
be wholly subdued to what it worked in. There 
are continual glimpses of something in him 
greater than he, hints of possibilities finer than 
anything he has done. You feel that the whole 
of him was better than any random specimens, 
though of his best, seem to prove. Incessupatety 
he has by times the large stride of the elder race, 
though it sinks too often into the slouch of a 
man who has seen better days. His grand air 



54 DRYDEN 

may, in part, spring from a habit of easy superi- 
ority to his competitors; but must also, in part, 
be ascribed to an innate dignity of character. 
That this preeminence should have been so 
generally admitted, during his life, can only be 
explained by a bottom of good sense, kindliness, 
and sound judgment, whose solid worth could 
afford that many a flurry of vanity, petulance, 
and even error should flit across the surface and 
be forgotten. Whatever else Dryden may have 
been, the last and abiding impression of him 
is, that he was thoroughly manly ; and while it 
may be disputed whether he were a great poet, 
it may be said of him, as Wordsworth said of 
Burke, that " he was by far the greatest man 
of his age, not only abounding in knowledge 
himself, but feeding, in various directions, his 
most able contemporaries." ' 

Dryden was born in 1631. He was accord- 
ingly six years old when Jonson died, was 
nearly a quarter of a century younger than Mil- 
ton, and may have personally known Bishop 
Hall, the first English satirist, who was living 
till 1656. On the other side, he was older than 
Swift by thirty-six, than Addison by forty-one, 
and than Pope by fifty-seven years. Dennis 
says that " Dryden, for the last ten years of his 

' "The great man must have that intellect which puts in 
motion the intellect of others." (Landor, Imaginary Con- 
versations, Diogenes and Plato.) 



DRYDEN 55 

life, was much acquainted with Addison, and 
drank with him more than he ever used to do, 
probably so far as to hasten his end," being 
commonly " an extreme sober man." Pope tells 
us that, in his twelfth year, he " saw Dryden," 
perhaps at Will's, perhaps in the street, as Scott 
did Burns. Dryden himself visited Milton now 
and then, and was intimate with Davenant, who 
could tell him of Fletcher and Jonson from per- 
sonal recollection. Thus he stands between the 
age before and that which followed him, giving a 
hand to each. His father was a country clergy- 
man, of Puritan leanings, a younger son of an an- 
cient county family. The Puritanism is thought 
to have come in with the poet's great-grandfather, 
who made in hiswill the somewhat singular state- 
ment that he was "assured by the Holy Ghost 
that he was elect of God." It would appear from 
this that Dryden's self-confidence was an inher- 
itance. The solid quality of his mind showed 
itself early. He himself tells us that he had read 
Polybius " in English, with the pleasure of a 
boy, before he was ten years of age, and yet 
even then had some dark notions of the prudence 
with which he conducted his design^ ' The con- 
cluding words are very characteristic, even if 
Dryden, as men commonly do, interpreted his 
boyish turn of mind by later self-knowledge. 
We thus get a glimpse of him browsing — for, 

' Character of Po/ybius (1692). 



56 DRYDEN 

like Johnson, Burke, and the full as distinguished 
from the learned men, he was always a random 
reader ' — in his father's library, and painfully 
culling here and there a spray of his own proper 
nutriment from among the stubs and thorns of 
Puritan divinity. After such schooling as could 
be had in the country, he was sent up to West- 
minster School, then under the headship of the 
celebrated Dr. Busby. Here he made his first 
essays in verse, translating, among other school 
exercises of the same kind, the third satire of 
Persius. In 1650 he was entered at Trinity Col- 
lege, Cambridge, and remained there for seven 
years. The only record of his college life is a 
discipline imposed, in 1652, for "disobedience 
to the Vice-Master, and contumacy in taking 
his punishment, inflicted by him." Whether 
this punishment was corporeal, as Johnson in- 
sinuates in the similar case of Milton, we are 
ignorant. He certainly retained no very fond 
recollection of his Alma Mater, for in his "Pro- 
logue to the University of Oxford " he says: — 

" Oxford to him a dearer name shall be 
Than his own mother university; 
Thebes did his green, unknowing youth engage. 
He chooses Athens in his riper age." 

By the death of his father, in 1654, he came 

' " For my own part, who must confess it to my shame 
that I never read anything but for pleasure." i^Life of Plu- 
tarch, 1683.) 



DRYDEN 57 

into possession of a small estate of sixty pounds 
a year, from which, however, a third must be 
deducted, for his mother's dower, till 1676. 
After leaving Cambridge, he became secretary 
to his near relative. Sir Gilbert Pickering, at 
that time Cromwell's chamberlain, and a mem- 
ber of his Upper House. In 1670 he succeeded 
Davenant as Poet Laureate,' and Howell as 
Historiographer, with a yearly salary of two 
hundred pounds. This place he lost at the Re- 
volution, and had the mortification to see his old 
enemy and butt, Shadwell, promoted to it, as 
the best poet the Whig party could muster. If 
William was obliged to read the verses of his 
official minstrel, Dryden was more than avenged. 
From 1688 to his death, twelve years later, he 
earned his bread manfully by his pen, without 
any mean complaining, and with no allusion to 
his fallen fortunes that is not dignified and 
touching. These latter years, during which he 
was his own man again, were probably the hap- 
piest of his life. In 1664 or 1665 he married 
Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Earl 
of Berkshire. About a hundred pounds a year 
were thus added to his income. The marriage 
is said not to have been a happy one, and per- 

' Gray says petulantly enough that " Dryden was as dis- 
graceful to the office, from his character, as the poorest 
scribbler could have been from his verses. ' ' (Gray to Mason, 
19th December, 1757.) 



58 DRYDEN 

haps it was not, for his wife was apparently a 
weak-minded woman ; but the inference from 
the internal evidence of Dryden's plays, as of 
Shakespeare's, is very untrustworthy, ridicule 
of marriage having always been a common stock 
in trade of the comic writers. 

The earliest of his verses that have come 
down to us were written upon the death of 
Lord Hastings, and are as bad as they can be, 
— a kind of parody on the worst of Donne. 
They have every fault of his manner, without 
a hint of the subtle and often profound thought 
that more than redeems it. As the Doctor him- 
self would have said, here is Donne outdone. 
The young nobleman died of the small-pox, 
and Dryden exclaims with truly comic pathos, — 

** Was there no milder way than the small-pox. 
The very filthiness of Pandora's box ? " 

He compares the pustules to " rosebuds 
stuck i' the lily skin about," and says that 

" Each little pimple had a tear in it 

To wail the fault its rising did commit." 

But he has not done his worst yet, by a great 
deal. What follows is even finer : — 

** No comet need foretell his change drew on. 
Whose corpse might seem a constellation. 
O, had he died of old, how great a strife 
Had been who from his death should draw their life ! 
Who should, by one rich draught, become whate'er 
Seneca, Cato, Numa, Cssar, were, 
III 



DRYDEN 59 

Learned, virtuous, pious, great, and have by this 
An universal metempsychosis! 
Must all these aged sires in one funeral 
Expire ? all die in one so young, so small ? " 

It is said that one of Allston's early pictures 
was brought to him, after he had long forgotten 
it, and his opinion asked as to the wisdom of 
the young artist's persevering in the career he 
had chosen. Allston advised his quitting it 
forthwith as hopeless. Could the same experi- 
ment have been tried with these verses upon 
Dryden, can any one doubt that his counsel 
would have been the same ? It should be re- 
membered, however, that he was barely turned 
eighteen when they were written, and the tend- 
ency of his style is noticeable in so early an 
abandonment of the participial ed in learned and 
aged. In the next year he appears again in some 
commendatory verses prefixed to the sacred epi- 
grams of his friend, John Hoddesdon. In these 
he speaks of the author as a 

" Young eaglet, who, thy nest thus soon forsook. 
So lofty and divine a course hast took 
As all admire, before the down begin 
To peep, as yet, upon thy smoother chin." 

Here is almost every fault which Dryden's 
later nicety would have condemned. But per- 
haps there is no schooling so good for an author 
as his own youthful indiscretions. Certainly 
there is none so severe. After this effort Dry- 



6o DRYDEN 

den seems to have lain fallow for ten years, and 
then he at length reappears in thirty-seven 
" heroic stanzas " on the death of Cromwell. 
The versification is smoother, but the conceits 
are there again, though in a milder form. The 
verse is modelled after " Gondibert." A sin- 
gle image from Nature (he was almost always 
happy in these) gives some hint of the maturer 
Dryden : — 

" And wars, like mists that rise against the sun, 
Made him but greater seem, not greater grow." 

Two other verses — 

" And the isle, when her protecting genius went. 
Upon his obsequies loud sighs conferred" — 

are interesting, because they show that he had 
been studying the early poems of Milton. He 
has contrived to bury under a rubbish of verbi- 
age one of the most purely imaginative pass- 
ages ever written by the great Puritan poet. 

♦' From haunted spring and dale. 
Edged with poplar pale. 
The parting genius is with sighing sent.' 

This is the more curious because, twenty-four 
years afterwards, he says, in defending rhyme : 
"Whatever causes he [Milton] alleges for the 
abolishment of rhyme, his own particular reason 
is plainly this, that rhyme was not his talent ; 
he had neither the ease of doing it nor the 
graces of it : which is manifest in his ' Juveniha,' 



DRYDEN 6i 

, . . where his rhyme is always constrained and 
forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age 
when the soul is most pliant, and the passion 
of love makes almost every man a rhymer, 
though not a poet."' It was this, no doubt, 
that heartened Dr. Johnson to say of "Lyci- 
das " that " the diction was harsh, the rhymes 
uncertain, and the numbers unpleaslng." It is 
Dryden's excuse that his characteristic excellence 
is to argue persuasively and powerfully, whether 
in verse or prose, and that he was amply en- 
dowed with the most needful quality of an 
advocate, — to be always strongly and wholly of 
his present way of thinking, whatever it might 
be. Next we have, in 1660, "Astrsea Redux" 
on the "happy restoration" of Charles II. In 
this also we can forebode little of the full-grown 
Dryden but his defects. We see his tendency 
to exaggeration, and to confound physical with 
metaphysical, as where he says of the ships that 
brought home the royal brothers, that 

** The joyful London meets 
The princely York, himself alone a freight. 
The Swiftsure groans beneath great Gloster's weight," — 

and speaks of the 

'* Repeated prayer 
Which stormed the skies and ravished Charles from thence. ' ' 

There is also a certain every-dayness, not to 

' Essay on the Origin and Progress of Satire. 



62 DRYDEN 

say vulgarity, of phrase, which Dryden never 
wholly refined away, and which continually 
tempts us to sum up at once against him as the 
greatest poet that ever was or could be made 
wholly out of prose. 

** Heaven Would no bargain for its blessings drive " 

is an example. On the other hand, there are a 
few verses almost worthy of his best days, as 
these : — 

♦* Some lazy ages lost in sleep and ease. 
No action leave to busy chronicles; 
Such whose supine felicity but makes 
In story chasms, in epochas mistakes. 
O'er whom Time gently shakes his wings of down. 
Till with his silent sickle they are mown." 

These are all the more noteworthy, that Dry- 
den, unless in argument, is seldom equal for 
six lines together. In the poem to Lord Clar- 
endon (1662) there are four verses that have 
something of the " energy divine " for which 
Pope praised his master. 

**Let envy, then, those crimes within you see 
From which the happy never must be free; 
Envy that does with misery reside. 
The joy and the revenge of ruined pride." 

In his "Aurengzebe " (1675) there is a pass- 
age, of which, as it is a good example of Dryden, 
I shall quote the whole, though my purpose 
aim mainly at the latter verses : — 



DRYDEN 63 

*• When I consider life, 't is all a cheat; 
Yet, fooled with Hope, men favor the deceit. 
Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay; 
To-morrow 's falser than the former day. 
Lies worse, and, while it says we shall be blest 
With some new joys, cuts off what we possest. 
Strange cozenage ! none would live past years again. 
Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain. 
And from the dregs of life think to receive 
What the first sprightly running could not give. 
I 'm tired of waiting for this chymic gold 
Which fools us young and beggars us when old." 

The " first sprightly running " of Dryden's 
vintage was, it must be confessed, a Httle muddy, 
if not beefy ; but if his own soil did not produce 
grapes of the choicest flavor, he knew where they 
were to be had ; and his product, like sound wine, 
grew better the longer it stood upon the lees. H e 
tells us, evidently thinking of himself, that in 
a poet, " from fifty to threescore, the balance 
generally holds even in our colder climates, for 
he loses not much in fancy, and judgment, which 
is the effect of observation, still increases. His 
succeeding years afford him little more than 
the stubble of his own harvest, yet, if his con- 
stitution be healthful, hi? mind may still retain 
a decent vigor, and the gleanings of that of 
Ephraim, in comparison with others, will sur- 
pass the vintage of Abiezer." ' Since Chaucer, 
none of our poets has had a constitution more 

' Dedication of the Georgics. 



64 DRYDEN 

healthful, and it was his old age that yielded the 
best of him. In him the understanding was, 
perhaps, in overplus for his entire good fortune 
as a poet, and that is a faculty among the earliest 
to mature. We have seen him, at only ten years, 
divining the power of reason in Polybius.' The 
same turn of mind led him later to imitate the 
French school of tragedy, and to admire in Ben 
Jonson the most correct of English poets. It 
was his imagination that needed quickening, and 
it is very curious to trace through his different 
prefaces the gradual opening of his eyes to the 
causes of the solitary preeminence of Shake- 
speare. At first he is sensible of an attraction 
towards him which he cannot explain, and for 
which he apologizes, as if it were wrong. But he 
feels himself drawn more and more strongly, till 
at last he ceases to resist altogether, and is forced 
to acknowledge that there is something in this 
one man that is not and never was anywhere else, 
something not to be reasoned about, ineffable, 
divine ; if contrary to the rules, so much the 
worse for them. It may be conjectured that 
Dryden's Puritan associations may have stood 
in the way of his more properly poetic culture, 
and that his early knowledge of Shakespeare 
was slight. He tells us that Davenant, whom 

' Dryden's penetration is always remarkable. His general 
judgment of Polybius coincides remarkably with that of 
Mommsen. (^Rom. Gesch. ii. 448, seq.') 



DRYDEN 65 

he could not have known before he himself 
was twenty-seven, first taught him to admire the 
great poet/ But even after his imagination had 
become conscious of its prerogative, and his ex- 
pression had been ennobled by frequenting this 
higher society, we find him continually dropping 
back into that sermo pedestris which seems, on 
the whole, to have been his more natural ele- 
ment. We always feel his epoch in him, and that 
he was the lock which let our language down 
from its point of highest poetry to its level of 
easiest and most gently flowing prose. His 
enthusiasm needs the contagion of other minds 
to arouse it; but his strong sense, his command 
of the happy word, his wit, which is distinguished 
by a certain breadth and, as it were, power of 
generalization, as Pope's by keenness of edge 
and point, were his, whether he would or no. 
Accordingly, his poetry is often best and his 
verse more flowing where (as in parts of his ver- 
sion of the twenty-ninth ode of the third book 
of Horace) he is amplifying the suggestions of 
another mind."" Viewed from one side, he justi- 

' Preface to the Tempest. He helped Davenant to vulgar- 
ize this play. 

^ ♦• I have taken some pains to make it my masterpiece in 
English." (Preface to Second Miscellany.^ Fox said that it 
" was better than the original." J. C. Scaliger said of Eras- 
mus: ** Ex alieno ingenio poeta, ex suo versificator. " Fox 
indeed preferred the " Ode to Fortune" above its Horatian 
original. Dryden has certainly let out a reef or two and given 



66 DRYDEN 

fies Milton's remark of him, that " he was a good 
rhymist, but no poet." To look at all sides, and 
to distrust the verdict of a single mood, is, no 
doubt, the duty of a critic. But how if a certain 
side be so often presented as to thrust forward in 
the memory and disturb it in the effort to recall 
that total impression (for the office of a critic is 
not, though often so misunderstood, to s?iy guilty 
or not guilty of some particular fact) which is the 
only safe ground of judgment ? It is the weight 
of the whole man, not of one or the other limb 
of him, that we want. Expende Hannibalem. 
Very good, but not in a scale capacious only of 
a single quality at a time, for it is their union, 
and not their addition, that assures the value of 
each separately. It was not this or that which 
gave him his weight in council, his swiftness of 
decision in battle that outran the forethought of 
other men, — it was Hannibal. But this prosaic 
element in Dryden will force itself upon me. As 
I read him, I cannot help thinking of an ostrich, 
to be classed with flying things, and capable, 
what with leap and flap together, of leaving the 
earth for a longer or shorter space, but loving 
the open plain, where wing and foot help each 
other to something that is both flight and run 
at once. What with his haste and a certain dash, 

a fuller sail to the verse. But the elegance ? The restrained 
rather than bellying expanse of phrase ? The perfect ade- 
quacy without excess ? 



DRYDEN 67 

which, according to our mood, we may call florid 
or splendid, he seems to stand among poets 
where Rubens does among painters, — greater, 
perhaps, as a colorist than an artist, yet great 
here also, if we compare him with any but the first. 
We have arrived at Dryden's thirty-second 
year, and thus far have found little in him to 
warrant an augury that he was ever to be one 
of the great names in English literature, the 
most perfect type, that is, of his class, and that 
class a high one, though not the highest. If 
Joseph de Maistre's axiom, ^z^/ napasvaincu 
a trente ans, ne vainer a jamais^ were quite true, 
there would be little hope of him, for he has 
won no battle yet. But there is something solid 
and doughty in the man, that can rise from 
defeat, the stuff of which victories are made in 
due time, when we are able to choose our posi- 
tion better, and the sun is at our back. Hith- 
erto his performances have been mainly of the 
obbligato sort, at which few men of original force 
are good, least of all Dryden, who had always 
something of stiffness in his strength. Waller 
had praised the living Cromwell in perhaps the 
manliest verses he ever wrote, — not very 
manly, to be sure, but really elegant, and, on 
the whole, better than those in which Dryden 
squeezed out melodious tears. Waller, who had 
also made himself conspicuous as a volunteer 
Antony to the country squire turned Caesar, — 



68 DRYDEN 

(" With ermine clad and purple, let him hold 
A royal sceptre made of Spanish gold "), — 

was more servile than Dryden in hailing the 
return of ex officio Majesty. He bewails to 
Charles, in snuffling heroics, — 

*' Our sorrow and our crime 
To have accepted life so long a time. 
Without you here." 

A weak man, put to the test by rough and 
angry times, as Waller was, may be pitied, but 
meanness is nothing but contemptible under 
any circumstances. If it be true that " every 
conqueror creates a Muse," Cromwell was un- 
fortunate. Even Milton's sonnet, though digni- 
fied, is reserved if not distrustful. Marvell's 
" Horatian Ode," the most truly classic in our 
language, is worthy of its theme. The same 
poet's " Elegy," in parts noble, and everywhere 
humanly tender, is worth more than all Car- 
lyle's biography as a witness to the gentler quali- 
ties of the hero, and of the deep affection that 
stalwart nature could inspire in hearts of truly 
masculine temper. As it is little known, a few 
verses of it may be quoted to show the differ- 
ence between grief that thinks of its object and 
grief that thinks of its rhymes : — 

** Valor, religion, fiiendship, prudence died 
At once with him, and all that 's good beside. 
And we, death's refuse, nature's dregs, confined 
To loathsome life, alas ! are left behind. 



DRYDEN 69 

Where we (so once we used) shall now no more. 
To fetch day, press about his chamber door. 
No more shall hear that powerful language charm. 
Whose force oft spared the labor of his arm. 
No more shall follow where he spent the days 
In war or counsel, or in prayer and praise. 

I saw him dead; a leaden slumber lies. 

And mortal sleep, over those wakeful eyes; 

Those gentle rays under the lids were fled. 

Which through his looks that piercing sweetness shed; 

That port, which so majestic was and strong. 

Loose and deprived of vigor stretched along. 

All withered, all discolored, pale, and wan. 

How much another thing! no more That Man! 

O human glory! vain! O death! O wings! 

O worthless world! O transitory things! 

Yet dwelt that greatness in his shape decayed 

That still, though dead, greater than Death he laid. 

And, in his altered face, you something feign 

That threatens Death he yet will live again." 

Such verses might not satisfy Lindley Mur- 
ray, but they are of that higher mood which 
satisfies the heart. These couplets, too, have 
an energy worthy of Milton's friend : — 

" When up the armed mountains of Dunbar 

He marched, and through deep Severn, ending war." 

** Thee, many ages hence, in martial verse 

Shall the English soldier, ere he charge, rehearse." 

On the whole, one is glad that Dryden's 
panegyric on the Protector was so poor. It 
was purely official verse-making. Had there 



70 DRYDEN 

been any feeling in it, there had been baseness 
in his address to Charles. As it is, we may 
fairly assume that he was so far sincere in both 
cases as to be thankful for a chance to exercise 
himself in rhyme, without much caring whether 
upon a funeral or a restoration. He might 
naturally enough expect that poetry would have 
a better chance under Charles than under Crom- 
well, or any successor with Commonwealth 
principles. Cromwell had more serious matters 
to think about than verses, while Charles might 
at least care as much about them as it was in 
his base good nature to care about anything 
but loose women and spaniels. Dryden's sound 
sense, afterwards so conspicuous, shows itself 
even in these pieces, when we can" get at it 
through the tangled thicket of tropical phrase. 
But the authentic and unmistakable Dryden 
first manifests himself in some verses addressed 
to his friend Dr. Charlton in 1663. We have 
first his common sense which has almost the 
point of wit, yet with a tang of prose : — 

" The longest tyranny that ever swayed 
Was that wherein our ancestors betrayed 
Their freeborn reason to the Stagyrite, 
And made his torch their universal light. 
So truth, while only 07ie supplied the itate^ 
Grew scarce and dear and yet sophisticate. 
Still it was bought, like empiric wares or charms. 
Hard words sealed up with AristotW s arms. ' ' 



DRYDEN 71 

Then we have his easy plenitude of fancy, where 
he speaks of the inhabitants of the New World as 

*' Guiltless men who danced away their time. 
Fresh as their groves and happy as their clime." 

And, finally, there is a hint of imagination where 
" mighty visions of the Danish race " watch round 
Charles sheltered in Stonehenge after the battle 
of Worcester. These passages might have been 
written by the Dryden whom we learn to know 
fifteen years later. They have the advantage that 
he wrote them to please himself. His contem- 
porary, Dr. Heylin, said of French cooks, that 
" their trade was not to feed the belly, but che 
palate." Dryden was a great while in learning 
this secret, as available in good writing as in 
cookery. He strove after it, but his thoroughly 
English nature, to the last, would too easily 
content itself with serving up the honest beef 
of his thought, without regard to daintiness of 
flavor in the dressing of it.' Of the best English 
poetry, it might be said that it is understanding 

' In one of the last letters he ever wrote, thanking his 
cousin Mrs. Steward for a gift of marrow-puddings, he says: 
♦•A chine of honest bacon would please my appetite more than 
all the marrow-puddings ; for I like them better plain, having 
a very vulgar stomach." So of Cowley he says : "There was 
plenty enough, but ill sorted, whole pyramids of sweetmeats 
for boys and women, but little of solid meat for men." The 
physical is a truer anti-type of the spiritual man than we are 
willing to admit, and the brain is often forced to acknowledge 
the inconvenient country-cousinship of the stomach. 



72 DRYDEN 

aerated by imagination. In Dry den the solid 
part too often refused to mix kindly with the 
leaven, either remaining lumpish or rising to a 
hasty puffiness. Grace and lightness were with 
him much more a laborious achievement than a 
natural gift, and it is all the more remarkable 
that he should so often have attained to what 
seems such an easy perfection in both. Always 
a hasty writer,' he was long in forming his style, 
and to the last was apt to snatch the readiest 
word rather than wait for the fittest. He was not 
wholly and unconsciously poet, buta thinker who 
sometimes lost himself on enchanted ground and 
was transfigured by its touch. This preponder- 
ance in him of the reasoning over the intuitive 
faculties, the one always there, the other flash- 
ing in when you least expect it, accounts for that 
inequality and even incongruousness in his writ- 
ing which makes one revise one's judgment at 
every tenth page. In his prose you come upon 
passages that persuade you he is a poet, in spite 
of his verses so often turning state's evidence 
against him as to convince you he is none. He 
is a prose-writer, with a kind of iEolian attach- 

' In his preface to All for Love, he says, evidently allud- 
ing to himself: " If he have a friend whose hastiness in writ- 
ing is his greatest fault, Horace would have taught him to have 
minced the matter, and to have called it readiness of thought 
and a flowing fancy." And in the Preface to the Fables he 
says of Homer: " This vehemence of his, I confess, is more 
suitable to my temper." He makes other allusions to it. 



DRYDEN 73 

ment. For example, take this bit of prose from 
the dedication of his version of Virgil's *' Pas- 
torals," 1694: " He found the strength of his 
genius betimes, and was even in his youth pre- 
luding to his Georgicks and his T^neis. He 
could not forbear to try his wings, though his 
pinions were not hardened to maintain a long, 
laborious flight ; yet sometimes they bore him 
to a pitch as lofty as ever he was able to reach 
afterwards. But when he was admonished by 
his subject to descend, he came down gently 
circling in the air and singing to the ground, like 
a lark melodious in her mounting and continu- 
ing her song till she alights, still preparing for a 
higher flight at her next sally, and tuning her 
voice to better music." This is charming, and 
yet even this wants the ethereal tincture that 
pervades the style of Jeremy Taylor, making it, 
as Burke said of Sheridan's eloquence, " neither 
prose nor poetry, but something better than 
either." Let us compare Taylor's treatment of 
the same image, which, I fancy, Dryden must 
have seen : " For so have I seen a lark rising 
from his bed of grass and soaring upwards, sing- 
ing as he rises, and hopes to get to heaven and 
climb above the clouds ; but the poor bird was 
beaten back by the loud sighings of an eastern 
wind, and his motion made irregular and incon- 
stant, descending more at every breath of the 
tempest than it could recover by the libration 



74 DRYDEN 

and frequent weighing of his wings, till the little 
creature was forced to sit down and pant, and 
stay till the storm was over, and then it made a 
prosperous flight, and did rise and sing as if it 
had learned music and motion of an angel as he 
passed sometimes through the air about his min- 
istries here below." Taylor's fault is that his 
sentences too often smell of the library, but 
what an open air is here ! How unpremeditated 
it all seems ! How carelessly he knots each new 
thought, as it comes, to the one before it with 
an andy like a girl making lace ! And what a 
slidingly musical use he makes of the sibilants 
with which our language is unjustly taxed by 
those who can only make them hiss, not sing ! 
There are twelve of them in the first twenty 
words, fifteen of which are monosyllables. We 
notice the structure of Dryden's periods, but this 
grows up as we read. It gushes, like the song 
of the bird itself, — 

" In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.' 
Let us now take a specimen of Dryden's bad 
prose from one of his poems. I open the "An- 
nus Mirabilis" at random, and hit upon this : — 

*♦ Our little fleet was now engaged so far. 
That, like the swordfish in the whale, they fought: 
The combat only seemed a civil war. 
Till through their bowels we our passage wrought." 

Is this Dryden, or Sternhold, or Shadwell, those 
Toms who made him say that " dulness was fatal 



DRYDEN 75 

to the name of Tom " ? The natural history of 
Goldsmith in the verse of Pye ! His thoughts 
did not " voluntary move harmonious numbers." 
He had his choice between prose and verse, and 
seems to be poetical on second thought. I do 
not speak without book. He was more than 
half conscious of it himself. In the same letter 
to Mrs. Steward, just cited, he says, " I am still 
drudging on, always a poet and never a good 
one "; and this from no mock-modesty, for he 
is always handsomely frank in telling us what- 
ever of his own doing pleased him. This was 
written in the last year of his life, and at about 
the same time he says elsewhere : " What judg- 
ment I had increases rather than diminishes, and 
thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so 
fast upon me that my only difficulty is to choose 
or to reject, to run them into verse or to give 
them the other harmony of prose; I have so long 
studied and practised both, that they are grown 
into a habit and become familiar to me," ' I 
think that a man who was primarily a poet 
would hardly have felt this equanimity of choice. 
I find a confirmation of this feeling about 
Dryden in his early literary loves. His taste 
was not an instinct, but the slow result of reflec- 
tion and of the manfulness v/ith which he always 
acknowledged to himself his own mistakes. In 
this latter respect few men deal so magnani- 

' Preface to the Fables. 



76 DRYDEN 

mously with themselves as he, and accordingly 
few have been so happily inconsistent. Ancora 
imparo might have served him for a motto as 
well as Michel Angelo. His prefaces are a com- 
plete log of his life, and the habit of writing them 
was a useful one to him, for it forced him to 
think with a pen in his hand, which, according 
to Goethe, " if it do no other good, keeps the 
mind from staggering about." In these prefaces 
we see his taste gradually rising from Du Bartas 
to Spenser, from Cowley to Milton, from Cor- 
neille to Shakespeare. " I remember when I was 
a boy," he says in his dedication of the " Spanish 
Friar," 1681, " I thought inimitable Spenser a 
mean poet in comparison of Sylvester's Du Bar- 
tas, and was rapt into an ecstasy when I read 
these lines : — 

" * Now when the winter's keener breath began 
To crystalhze the Baltic ocean. 
To glaze the lakes, to bridle up the floods. 
And periwig with snow ' the baldpate woods.' 

I am much deceived if this be not abominable 
fustian." Swift, in his "Tale of a Tub," has a 

' Woolh Sylvester's word. Dryden reminds us of Burke 
in this also, that he always quotes from memory and seldom 
exactly. His memory was better for things than for words. 
This helps to explain the length of time it took him to master 
that vocabulary at last so various, full, and seemingly extempo- 
raneous. He is a large quoter, though, with his usual in- 
consistency, he says, "I am no admirer of quotations." 
(^Essay on Heroic Plays.^ 



DRYDEN n 

ludicrous passage in this style : " Look on this 
globe of earth, you will find it to be a very com- 
plete and fashionable dress. What is that which 
some call land but a fine coat faced with green ? 
or the sea^ but a waistcoat of water-tabby ? Pro- 
ceed to the particular works of creation, you will 
find how curious journeyman Nature has been 
to trim up the vegetable beaux ; observe how 
sparkish a periwig adorns the head of a beech^ and 
what a fine doublet of white satin is worn by the 
birch," The fault is not In anyinaptness of the 
images, nor in the mere vulgarity of the things 
themselves, but in that of the associations they 
awaken. The " prithee, undo this button " of 
Lear, coming where it does and expressing what 
it does, is one of those touches of the pathet- 
ically sublime, of which only Shakespeare ever 
knew the secret. Herrick, too, has a charming 
poem on" Julia's petticoat," the charm being that 
he exalts the familiar and the low to the region 
of sentiment. In the passage from Sylvester, it 
is precisely the reverse, and the wig takes as 
much from the sentiment as it adds to a Lord 
Chancellor. So Pope's proverbial verse — 

** True wit is Nature to advantage drest " — 
unpleasantly suggests Nature under the hands 
of a lady's-maid.' We have no word in English 

' In the Epimetheus of a poet usually as elegant as Gray 
himself, one's finer sense is a little jarred by the 
' ' Spectral gleam their snow-white dresses. ' ' 



78 DRYDEN 

that will exactly define this want of propriety in 
diction. Vulgar is too strong, and commonplace 
too weak. Perhaps bourgeois comes as near as 
any. It is to be noticed that Dryden does not 
unequivocally condemn the passage he quotes, 
but qualifies it with an " if I am not much mis- 
taken." Indeed, though his judgment in sub- 
stantials, like that of Johnson, is always worth 
having, his taste, the negative half of genius, 
never altogether refined itself from a colloquial 
familiarity, which is one of the charms of his 
prose, and gives that air of easy strength in 
which his satire is unmatched. In his " Royal 
Martyr" (1669), the tyrant Maximin says to 
the gods : — 

*• Keep you your rain and sunshine in the skies. 
And I '11 keep back my flame and sacrifice; 
Tour trade of Heaven shall soon be at a stand. 
And all your goods He dead upon your hand,''^ — 

a passage which has as many faults as only Dry- 
den was capable of committing, even to a false 
idiom forced by the last rhyme. The same 
tyrant in dying exclaims : — 

** And after thee I Ml go. 
Revenging still, an following e'en to th' other world my 

blow. 
And, shoving back this earth on which I sit, 
V II mount and scatter all the gods I hit.'''' 

In the "Conquest of Granada" (1670), we 
have : — 



DRYDEN 79 

*• This little loss in our vast body shews 
So small, that half have never heard the news; 
Fame 's out of breath e'er she can fi^ so far 
To tell 'em all that you have e'er made war." • 

And in the same play, — 

*♦ That busy thing. 
The soul, is packing up, and just on wing 
Like parting swallows when they seek the spring," — 

where the last sweet verse curiously illustrates 
that inequality (poetry on a prose background) 
which so often puzzles us in Dryden. Infinitely 
worse is the speech of Almanzor to his mother's 
ghost : — 

** I '11 rush into the covert of the night 
And pull thee backward by the shroud to light. 
Or else I '11 squeeze thee hke a bladder there. 
And make thee groan thyself away to air." 

What wonder that Dryden should have been 
substituted for Davenant as the butt of the 
" Rehearsal," and that the parody should have 
had such a run ? And yet it was Dryden who, 

' This probably suggested to Young the grandiose image 
in his Last Day (bk. ii.): — 

*' Those overwhelming armies . . . 
Whose rear lay wrapt in night, while breaking dawn 
Roused the broad front and called the battle on." 

This, to be sure, is no plagiarism; but it should be carried to 
Dryden' s credit that we catch the poets of the next half cen- 
tury oftener with their hands in his pockets than in those of 
any one else. 



8o DRYDEN 

in speaking of Persius, hit upon the happy- 
phrase of " boisterous metaphors " ; ' it was 
Dryden who said of Cowley, whom he else- 
where calls " the darling of my youth," "" that 
he was " sunk in reputation because he could 
never forgive any conceit which came in his 
way, but swept, like a drag-net, great and 
small." ^ But the passages I have thus far cited 
as specimens of our poet's coarseness (for poet 
he surely was intus^ though not always in cute) 
were written before he was forty, and he had an 

' Essay on Satire. ^ Ibid. 

3 Preface to Fables. Men are always inclined to revenge 
themselves on their old idols in the first enthusiasm of conversion 
to a purer faith. Cowley had all the faults that Dryden loads 
him with, and yet his popularity was to some extent deserved. 
He at least had a theory that poetry should soar, not creep, and 
longed for some expedient, in the failure of natural wings, by 
which he could lift himself away from the conventional and com- 
monplace. By beating out the substance of Pindar very thin, he 
contrived a kind of balloon which, tumid with gas, did certainly 
mount a little, into the clouds, if not above them, though sure 
to come suddenly down with a bump. His odes, indeed, are 
an alternation of upward jerks and concussions, and smack 
more of Chapelain than of the Theban, but his prose is very 
agreeable, — Montaigne and water, perhaps, but with some 
flavor of the Gascon wine left. The strophe of his ode to Dr. 
Scarborough, in which he compares his surgical friend, oper- 
ating for the stone, to Moses striking the rock, more than jus- 
tifies all the ill that Dryden could lay at his door. It was into 
precisely such mud-holes that Cowley's Will-o' -the- Wisp had 
misguided him. Men may never wholly shake off a vice but 
they are always conscious of it, and hate the tempter. 



DRYDEN 8i 

odd notion, suitable to his healthy complexion, 
that poets on the whole improve after that date. 
Man at forty, he says, " seems to be fully in 
his summer tropic, . . . and I believe that It 
will hold In all great poets that, though they 
wrote before with a certain heat of genius which 
inspired them, yet that heat was not perfectly 
digested." ' But artificial heat Is never to be 
digested at all, as Is plain in Dryden's case. He 
was a man who warmed slowly, and, In his hurry 
to supply the market, forced his mind. The 
result was the same after forty as before. In 
" CEdipus " (1679) we find — 

" Not one bolt 
Shall err from Thebes, but more be called for, more, 
New-rnouliied thunder of a larger size ! " 

This play was written in conjunction with Lee, 
of whom Dryden relates^ that, when some one 
said to him, " It Is easy enough to write like a 
madman," he replied, "No, It is hard to write 
like a madman, but easy enough to write like a 
fool," — perhaps the most compendious lecture 
on poetryeverdellvered. The splendid bitof elo- 
quence, which has so much the sheet-Iron clang 
of Impeachment thunder (I hope that Dryden 
Is not In the Library of Congress !) is perhaps 
Lee's. The following passage almost certainly 
is his : — 

' Dedication of Georgics. 

^ In a letter to Dennis, 1 693, 



82 DRYDEN 

** Sure 't is the end of all things ! Fate has torn 
The lock of Time off, and his head is now 
The ghastly ball of round Eternity! " 

But the next, in which the soul is likened to the 
pocket of an indignant housemaid charged with 
theft, is wholly in Dryden's manner : — 

" No; I dare challenge heaven to turn me outward. 
And shake my soul quite empty in your sight," 

In the same style, he makes his Don Sebastian 
(1690) say that he is as much astonished as 
" drowsy mortals " at the last trump, — 

♦< When, called in haste, they fumble for their limbs,*^ — 

and propose to take upon himself the whole of 
a crime shared with another by asking Heaven 
to charge the bill on him. And in "King Arthur," 
written ten years after the Preface from which I 
have quoted his confession about Du Bartas, we 
have a passage precisely of the kind he con- 
demned : — 

•* Ah for the many souls as hut this morn 
Were clothed with flesh and warmed with vital blood. 
But naked now, or shirted but with air." 

Dryden too often violated his own admirable 
rule, that " an author is not to write all he can, 
but only all he ought." ' In his worst images, 
however, there is often a vividness that half 
excuses them. But it is a grotesque vividness, 

' Preface to Fables. 



DRYDEN 83 

as from the flare of a bonfire. They do not flash 
into sudden lustre, as in the great poets, where 
the imaginations of poet and reader leap toward 
each other and meet halfway. 

English prose is indebted to Dryden for hav- 
ing freed it from the cloister of pedantry. He, 
more than any other single writer, contributed, 
as well by precept as example, to give it supple- 
ness of movement and the easier air of the mod- 
ern world. His own style, juicy with proverbial 
phrases, has that familiar dignity, so hard to 
attain, perhaps unattainable except by one who, 
like Dryden, feels that his position is assured. 
Charles Cotton is as easy, but not so elegant ; 
Walton as familiar, but not so flowing ; Swift 
as idiomatic, but not so elevated ; Burke more 
splendid, but not so equally luminous. That 
his style was no easy acquisition (though, of 
course, the aptitude was innate) he himself tells 
us. In his dedication of" Troilus and Cressida " 
(1679), where he seems to hint at the erection 
of an Academy, he says that " the perfect know- 
ledge of a tongue was never attained by any 
single person. The Court, the College, and the 
Town must all be joined in it. And as our Eng- 
lish is a composition of the dead and living 
tongues, there is required a perfect knowledge, 
not only of the Greek and Latin, but of the Old 
German, French, and Italian, and to help all 
these, a conversation with those authors of our 



84 DRYDEN 

own who have written with the fewest faults in 
prose and verse. But how barbarously we yet 
write and speak your Lordship knows, and I 
am sufficiently sensible in my own English.' 
For I am often put to a stand in considering 
whether what I write be the idiom of the tongue, 
or false grammar and nonsense couched beneath 
that specious name of Anglicism, and have no 
other way to clear my doubts but by translat- 
ing my English into Latin, and thereby trying 
what sense the words will bear in a more stable 
language." I'antae moUs erat. Five years later: 
"The proprieties and delicacies of the English 
are known to few ; it is im.possible even for a 
good wit to understand and practise them with- 
out the help of a liberal education, long read- 
ing and digesting of those few good authors we 
have amongst us, the knowledge of men and 
manners, the freedom of habitudes and conversa- 
tion with the best company of both sexes, and, in 
short, without wearing off the rust which he 
contracted while he was laying in a stock of 
learning." In the passage I have italicized, it 

' More than half a century later, Orrery, in his " Re- 
marks " on Swift, says: "We speak and we write at ran- 
dom; and if a man's common conversation were committed 
to paper, he would be startled yi^r to find himself guilty in so 
fczv sentences of so many solecisms and such false English." 
I do not remember _/or to anywhere in Dryden's prose. So 
few has long been denizened; no wonder, since it is nothing 
more than si peu Anglicized. 



DRYDEN 85 

will be seen that Dryden lays some stress upon 
the influence of women in refining language. 
Swift, also, in his plan for an Academy, says : 
" Now, though I would by no means give the 
ladies the trouble of advising us in the reforma- 
tion of our language, yet I cannot help thinking 
that, since they have been left out of all meet- 
ings except parties at play, or where worse de- 
signs are carried on, our conversation has very 
much degenerated." ' Swift affirms that the 
language had grown corrupt since the Restora- 
tion, and that " the Court, which used to be the 
standard of propriety and correctness of speech, 
was then, and, I think, has ever since continued, 
the worst school in England." " He lays the 

' Letter to the Lord High Treasurer. 

2 Ibid. He complains of " manglings and abbreviations." 
** What does your Lordship think of the words drudg'd, dis- 
turb' d, rebuk'd, fledg'd, and a thousand others ^ " In a con- 
tribution to the Tatler (No. 230) he ridicules the use o? ^ urn 
for them, and a number of slang phrases, among which is mob. 
" The war," he says, *' has introduced abundance of polysyl- 
lables, which will never be able to live many more campaigns." 
Speculations, operations, preliminaries, ambassadors, pallisa- 
does, communication, circumvallation, battalions, are the in- 
stances he gives, and all are now familiar. No man, or body 
of men, can dam the stream of language. Dryden is rather 
fond of ^ em for them, but uses it rarely in his prose. Swift 
himself prefers V is to it is, as does Emerson still. In what 
Swift says of the poets, he may be fairly suspected of glancing 
at Dryden, who was his kinsman, and whose prefaces and 
translation of Virgil he ridicules in the Tale of a Tub. Dry- 



86 DRYDEN 

blame partly on the general licentiousness, partly 
upon the French education of many of Charles's 
courtiers, and partly on the poets. Dryden 
undoubtedly formed his diction by the usage of 
the Court. The age was a very free-and-easy, 
not to say a very coarse one. Its coarseness 
was not external, like that of Elizabeth's day, 
but the outward mark of an inward depravity. 
What Swift's notion of the refinement of women 
was may be judged by his anecdotes of Stella. I 
will not say that Dryden's prose did not gain by 
the conversational elasticity which his frequent- 
ing men and women of the world enabled him 
to give it. It is the best specimen of every-day 
style that we have. But the habitual dwelling 
of his mind in a commonplace atmosphere, and 
among those easy levels of sentiment which 
befitted Will's Coffee-house and the Bird-cage 
Walk, was a damage to his poetry. Solitude is 
as needful to the imagination as society is whole- 
some for the character. He cannot always dis- 
tinguish between enthusiasm and extravagance 

den is reported to have said of him, ** Cousin Swift is no 
poet." The Dean began his literary career by Pindaric odes 
to Athenian Societies and the like, — perhaps the greatest mis- 
take as to his own powers of which an author was ever guilty. 
It was very likely that he would send these to his relative, 
already distinguished, for his opinion upon them. If this was 
so, the justice of Dryden's judgment must have added to the 
smart. Swift never forgot or forgave; Dryden was careless 
enough to do the one, and large enough to do the other. 



DRYDEN 87 

when he sees them. But apart from these influ- 
ences which I have adduced in exculpation, there 
was certainly a vein of coarseness in him, a want 
of that exquisite sensitiveness which is the con- 
science of the artist. An old gentleman, writing 
to the " Gentleman's Magazine" in 1745, pro- 
fesses to remember "plain John Dry den (before 
he paid his court with success to the great) in 
one uniform clothing of Norwich drugget. I 
have eat tarts at the Mulberry Garden with him 
and Madam Reeve, when our author advanced 
to a sword and Chadreux wig." ' I always fancy 
Dryden in the drugget, with wig, lace ruffles, 
and sword superimposed. It is the type of this 
curiously incongruous man. 

' Both Malone and Scott accept this gentleman's evidence 
without question, but I confess suspicion of a memory that 
runs back more than eighty-one years, and recollects a man 
before he had any claim to remembrance. Dryden was never 
poor, and there is at Oxford a portrait of him painted in 1 664, 
which represents him in a superb periwig and laced band. 
This was '* before he had paid his court with success to the 
great." But the story is at least ben trovato, and morally true 
enough to serve as an illustration. Who the " old gentleman " 
was has never been discovered. Of Crowne (who has some 
interest for us as a sometime student at Harvard) he says : 
•* Many a cup of metheglin have I drank with little starch' d 
Johnny Crown; we called him so, from the stiff, unalterable 
primness of his long cravat." Crowne reflects no more credit 
on his Alma Mater than Downing. Both were sneaks, and of 
such a kind as, I think, can only be produced by a debauched 
Puritanism. Crowne, as a rival of Dryden, is contemptuously 
alluded to by Cibber in his Apology. 



88 DRYDEN 

The first poem by which Dryden won a 
general acknowledgment of his power was the 
"Annus Mirabilis," written in his thirty-seventh 
year. Pepys, himself not altogether a bad judge, 
doubtless expresses the common opinion when 
he says : " I am very well pleased this night 
with reading a poem I brought home with me 
last night from Westminster Hall, of Dryden's, 
upon the present war ; a very good poem." * 
And a very good poem, in some sort, it con- 
tinues to be, in spite of its amazing blemishes. 
We must always bear in mind that Dryden 
lived in an age that supplied him with no ready- 
made inspiration, and that big phrases and 
images are apt to be pressed into the service 
when great ones do not volunteer. With this 
poem begins the long series of Dryden's pre- 
faces, of which Swift made such excellent, though 
malicious, fun that I cannot forbear to quote it. 
" I do utterly disapprove and declare against 
that pernicious custom of making the preface 
a bill of fare to the book. For I have always 
looked upon it as a high point of indiscretion 
in monster-mongersand other retailers of strange 
sights to hang out a fair picture over the door, 
drawn after the life, with a most eloquent de- 

' Diary, iii. 390. Almost the only notices of Dryden that 
make him alive to me I have found in the delicious book of this 
Polonius-Montaigne, the only man who ever had the courage 
to keep a sincere journal, even under the shelter of cipher. 



DRYDEN 89 

scription underneath ; this has saved me many 
a threepence. . . . Such is exactly the fate at 
this time oi prefaces. . . . This expedient was 
admirable at first ; our great Dryden has long 
carried it as far as it would go, and with incred- 
ible success. He has often said to me in con- 
fidence, * that the world would never have sus- 
pected him to be so great a poet, if he had not 
assured them so frequently, in his prefaces, that 
it was impossible they could either doubt or 
forget it.' Perhaps it may be so ; however, I 
much fear his instructions have edified out of 
their place, and taught men to grow wiser in 
certain points where he never intended they 
should." ' The monster-mongers is a terrible 
thrust, when we remember some of the come- 
dies and heroic plays which Dryden ushered in 
this fashion. In the dedication of the "Annus " 
to the city of London is one of those pithy sen- 
tences of which Dryden is ever afterwards so 
full, and which he lets fall with a carelessness 
that seems always to deepen the meaning : " I 
have heard, indeed, of some virtuous persons 
who have ended unfortunately, but never of 
any virtuous nation ; Providence is engaged too 
deeply when the cause becomes so general." 

' Tale of a Tub, sect. v. Pepys also speaks of buying the 
Maiden Queen of Mr. Dryden' s, which he himself, in his 
preface, seems to brag of, and indeed is a good play. (i8th 
January, 1668.) 



90 DRYDEN 

In his " account " of the poem in a letter to 
Sir Robert Howard he says: " I have chosen 
to write my poem in quatrains or stanzas of four 
in alternate rhyme, because I have ever judged 
them more noble and of greater dignity, both 
for the sound and number, than any other verse 
in use amongst us. . . . The learned languages 
have certainly a great advantage of us in not 
being tied to the slavery of any rhyme. . . . 
But in this necessity of our rhymes, I have al- 
ways found the couplet verse most easy, though 
not so proper for this occasion ; for there the 
work is sooner at an end, every two lines con- 
cluding the labor of the poet." A little further 
on : " They [the French] write in alexandrines, 
or verses of six feet, such as amongst us is the 
old translation of Homer by Chapman : all 
which, by lengthening their chain,' makes the 

^ He is fond of this image. In the Maiden Queen Cela- 
don tells Sabina that, when he is with her rival Florimel, his 
heart is still her prisoner, •' it only draws a longer chain after 
it." Goldsmith's fancy was taken by it; and everybody ad- 
mires in the ** Traveller " the extraordinary conceit of a 
heart dragging a lengthening chain. The smoothness of too 
many rhymed pentameters is that of thin ice over shallow 
water; so long as we glide along rapidly, all is well; but if 
we dwell a moment on any one spot, we may find ourselves 
knee-deep in mud. A later poet, in trying to improve on 
Goldsmith, shows the ludicrousness of the image: — 
" And round my heart's leg ties its galling chain." 

To write imaginatively a man should have — imagination! 



DRYDEN 91 

sphere of their activity the greater." I have 
quoted these passages because, in a small com- 
pass, they include several things characteristic 
of Dryden. " I have ever judged," and " 1 
have always found," are particularly so. If he 
took up an opinion in the morning, he would 
have found so many arguments for it before 
night that it would seem already old and fa- 
miliar. So with his reproach of rhyme ; a year 
or two before he was eagerly defending it ; ' 
again a few years, and he will utterly condemn 
and drop it in his plays, while retaining it in 
his translations ; afterwards his study of Milton 
leads him to think that blank verse would suit 
the epic style better, and he proposes to try it 
with Homer, but at last translates one book 
as a specimen, and behold, it is in rhyme ! But 
the charm of this great advocate is, that, what- 
ever side he was on, he could always find ex- 
cellent reasons for it, and state them with great 
force and abundance of happy illustration. He 
is an exception to the proverb, and is none the 
worse pleader that he is always pleading his 
own cause. The blunder about Chapman is of 
a kind into which his hasty temperament often 
betrayed him. He remembered that Chapman's 
" Iliad " was in a long measure, concluded with- 

' See his epistle dedicatory to the Rival Ladies (1664). 
For the other side, see particularly a passage in his Discourse 
on Epic Poetry (1697). 



92 DRYDEN 

out looking that it was alexandrine, and then 
attributes it generally to his " Homer." Chap- 
man's " Iliad "is done in fourteen-syllable verse, 
and his " Odyssee " in the very metre that Dry- 
den himself used in his own version.' I remark 
also what he says of the couplet, that it was 
easy because the second verse concludes the 
labor of the poet. And yet it was Dryden who 
found it hard for that very reason. His vehe- 
ment abundance refused those narrow banks, 
first running over into a triplet, and, even then 
uncontainable, rising to an alexandrine in the 
concluding verse. And I have little doubt that 
it was the roominess, rather than the dignity, 
of the quatrain which led him to choose it. As 
apposite to this, I may quote what he elsewhere 
says of octosyllabic verse : " The thought can 
turn itself with greater ease in a larger compass. 
When the rhyme comes too thick upon us, it 

' In the same way he had two years before assumed that 
Shakespeare " was the first who, to shun the pains of con- 
tinued rhyming, invented that kind of writing which we call 
blank verse " ! Dryden was never, I suspect, a very careful 
student of English literature. He seems never to have known 
that Surrey translated a part of the jEneid (and with great 
spirit) into blank verse. Indeed, he was hot a scholar, in 
the proper sense of the word, but he had that faculty of rapid 
assimilation without study, so remarkable in Coleridge and 
other rich minds, whose office is rather to impregnate than to 
invent. These brokers of thought perform a great office in 
literature, second only to that of originators. 



DRYDEN 93 

straitens the expression : we are thinking of the 
close, when we should be employed in adorn- 
ing the thought. It makes a poet giddy with 
turning in a space too narrow for his imagina- 
tion." • 

Dryden himself, as was not always the case 
with him, was well satisfied with his work. He 
calls it his best hitherto, and attributes his suc- 
cess to the excellence of his subject, " incom- 
parably the best he had ever had, excepting only 
the Royal Family." The first part is devoted to 
the Dutch war ; the last to the fire of London. 
The martial half is infinitely the better of the 
two. He altogether surpasses his model, Dave- 
nant. If his poem lack the gravity of thought 
attained by a few stanzas of " Gondibert," it is 
vastly superior in life, in picturesqueness, in the 
energy of single lines, and, above all, in imagi- 
nation. Few men have read " Gondibert," and 
almost every one speaks of it, as commonly of 
the dead, with a certain subdued respect. And 
it deserves respect as an honest effort to bring 
poetry back to its highest office in the ideal 
treatment of life. Davenant emulated Spenser, 
and if his poem had been as good as his pre- 
face, it could still be read in another spirit than 

' Essay on Satire. What he has said just before this about 
Butler is worth noting. Butler had had a chief hand in the 
Rehearsal, but Dryden had no grudges where the question 
was of giving its just praise to merit. 



94 DRYDEN 

that of investigation. As it is, it always reminds 
me of Goldsmith's famous verse. It is remote, 
unfriendly, solitary, and, above all, slow. Its 
shining passages, for there are such, remind one 
of distress-rockets sent up at Intervals from a 
ship just about to founder, and sadden rather 
than cheer.' 

The first part of the " Annus Mirabilis " is 
by no means clear of the false taste of the time,^ 
though it has some of Dryden's manliest verses 
and happiest comparisons, always his two dis- 
tinguishing merits. Here, as almost everywhere 
else in Dryden, measuring him merely as poet, 
we recall what he, with pathetic pride, says of 
himself In the prologue to " Aurengzebe ": — 

•* Let him retire, betwixt two ages cast. 
The first of this, the hindmost of the last." 

' The conclusion of the second canto of Book Third is the 
best continuously fine passage. Dryden's poem has nowhere 
so much meaning in so small space as Davenant, when he 
says of the sense of honor that, — 

"Like Power, it grows to nothing, growing less." 

Davenant took the hint of the stanza from Sir John Davies. 
Wyatt first used it, so far as I know, in English. 

2 Perhaps there is no better lecture on the prevailing vices 
of style and thought (if thought -this frothy ferment of the 
mind may be called) than in Cotton Mather's Magnolia. 
For Mather, like a true provincial, appropriates only the man- 
nerism, and, as is usual in such cases, betrays all its weakness 
by the unconscious parody of exaggeration. 



DRYDEN 95 

What can be worse than what he says of 
comets ? — 

•* Whether they unctuous exhalations are 
Fired by the sun, or seeming so alone. 
Or each some more remote and slippery star 
Which loses footing when to mortals shown." 

Or than this, of the destruction of the Dutch 
India ships ? — 

** Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball. 
And now their odors armed against them fly; 
Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall. 
And some by aromatic splinters die." 

Dear Dr. Johnson had his doubts about Shake- 
speare, but here at least was poetry ! This is one 
of the quatrains which he pronounces " worthy 
of our author." ' 

But Dryden himself has said that " a man 
who is resolved to praise an author with any 
appearance of justice must be sure to take him 
on the strongest side, and where he is least liable 

' The Doctor was a capital judge of the substantial value of 
the goods he handled, but his judgment always seems that of the 
thumb and forefinger. For the shades, the disposition of colors, 
the beauty of the figures, he has as good as no sense whatever. 
The critical parts of his Life of Dryden seem to me the best 
of his writing in this kind. There is little to be gleaned after 
him. He had studied his author, which he seldom did, and 
his criticism is sympathetic, a thing still rarer with him. As 
illustrative of his own habits, his remarks on Dryden' s reading 
are curious. 



96 DRYDEN 

to exceptions." This is true also of one who 
wishes to measure an author fairly, for the higher 
wisdom of criticism lies in the capacity to ad- 
mire. 

Leser, wie gefall ich dir? 

Leser, wie gefallst du mir ? — 

are both fair questions, the answer to the first 
being more often involved in that to the second 
than is sometimes thought. The poet in Dry- 
den was never more fully revealed than in such 
verses as these : — 

*• And threatening France, placed like a painted Jove,* 
Kept idle thunder in his lifted hand ' ' ; 

*• Silent in smoke of cannon they come on "; 

'Perhaps the hint was given by a phrase of Corneille, 
monarque en peinture. Dryden seldom borrows, unless from 
Shakespeare, without improving, and he borrowed a great 
deal. Thus in Don Sebastian (of suicide): — 

" Brutus and Cato might discharge their souls, 
And give them furloughs for the other world ; 
But we, like sentries, are obliged to stand 
In starless nights and wait the appointed hour." 

The thought is Cicero's, but how it is intensified by the " star- 
less nights"! Dryden, I suspect, got it from his favorite, 
Montaigne, who says, '* Que nous ne pouvons abandonner 
cette garnison du monde, sans le commandement exprez de 
celuy qui nous y a mis." (Lib. ii. chap. 3.) In the same 
play, by a very Drydenish verse, he gives new force to an old 
comparison : — 

" And I should break, through laws divine and human. 
And think 'em cobwebs spread for little man, 
Which all the bulky herd of Nature breaks J'^ 



DRYDEN 97 

" And his loud guns speak thick, like angry men "; 

*' The vigorous seaman every port-hole plies. 
And adds his heart to every gun he fires ' ' ; 

"And, though to me unknown, they sure fought well. 
Whom Rupert led, and who were British born." 

This is masculine writing, and yet it must be 
said that there is scarcely a quatrain in which 
the rhyme does not trip him- into a platitude, 
and there are too many swaggering with that 
expression forte d'un sentiment faible which Vol- 
taire condemns in Corneille, — a temptation to 
which Dryden always lay too invitingly open. 
But there are passages higher in kind than any I 
have cited, because they show imagination. Such 
are the verses in which he describes the dreams 
of the disheartened enemy: — 

•* In dreams they fearful precipices tread. 

Or, shipwrecked, labor to some distant shore. 
Or in dark churches walk among the dead "; — 

and those in which he recalls glorious memories, 
and sees where 

"The mighty ghosts of our great Harries rose. 
And armed Edwards looked with anxious eyes." 

A few verses, like the pleasantly alliterative 
one in which he makes the spider, " from the 
silent ambush of his den," " feel far off the 
trembling of his thread," show that he was 
beginning to study the niceties of verse, instead 
of trusting wholly to what he would have called 



98 DRYDEN 

his natural fougue. On the whole, this part of 
the poem is very good war poetry, as war poetry 
goes (for there is but one first-rate poem of the 
kind in English, — short, national, eager as if 
the writer were personally engaged, with the 
rapid metre of a drum beating the charge, — and 
that is Drayton's " Battle of Agincourt " '), but 
it shows more study of Lucan than of Virgil, 
and for a long time yet we shall find Dryden 
bewildered by bad models." He is always imi- 
tating — no, that is not the word, always emulat- 
ing — somebody in his more strictly poetical 
attempts, for in that direction he always needed 
some external impulse to set his mind in motion. 
This is more or less true of all authors ; nor 
does it detract from their originality,, which de- 
pends wholly on their being able so far to for- 
get themselves as to let something of themselves 
slip into what they write.'' In his prologue to 
" Albumazar " Dryden himself says of Ben 
Jonson, — 

** But Ben made nobly his what he did mould. 
What was another's lead becomes his gold." 

The wise will call mould as good a euphemism 

' Not his solemn historical droning under that title, but 
addressed *<To the Cambrio-Britons on their harp." 

^ '* Les poetes euxmemes s'animent et s'echauiFent par la 
lecture des autres poetes. Messieurs de Malherbe, Corneille, 
etc., se disposoient au travail par la lecture des poetes qui 
etoient de leur gout." (Vigneul-Marvilliana, i. 64, 65.) 



DRYDEN * 99 

as convey I Of absolute originality we will not 
speak till authors are raised by some Deucalion- 
and-Pyrrha process ; and even then our faith 
would be small, for writers who have no past 
are pretty sure of having no future. Dryden, at 
any rate, always had to have his copy set him 
at the top of the page, and wrote ill or well 
accordingly. His mind (somewhat solid for a 
poet) warmed slowly, but, once fairly heated 
through, he had more of that good luck of self- 
oblivion than most men. He certainly gave even 
a liberal interpretation to Moliere's ruleof tak^ 
ing his own property wherever he found it, 
though he sometimes blundered awkwardly 
about what was properly his ; but in literature, 
it should be remembered,a thing always becomes 
his at last who says it best, and thus makes it his 
own.' 

' For example. Waller had said, — 

" Others may use the ocean as their road. 
Only the English maie it their abode ; 



We tread on billoivs ivith a steady foot " — 

long before Campbell. Campbell helps himself to both 
thoughts, enlivens them into 

" Her march is o'er^he mountain wave, 
Her home is on the deep," — 

and they are his forevermore. His "leviathans afloat" he 
lifted from the Jnnus Mirabilis ; but in what court could 
Dryden sue ? Again, Waller in another poem calls the Duke 
of York's flag 

"His dreadful streamer, like a comet's hair"j — 



loo DRYDEN 

Mr. Savage Landor once told me that he said 
to Wordsworth : " Mr. Wordsworth, a man may 
mix poetry with prose as much as he pleases, 
and it will only elevate and enliven ; but the 
moment he mixes a particle of prose with his 
poetry, it precipitates the whole." Wordsworth, 
he added, never forgave him. The always hasty 
Dryden, as I think I have already said, was 
liable, like a careless apothecary's 'prentice, to 
make the same confusion of ingredients, espe- 
cially in the more mischievous way. I cannot 
leave the " Annus Mirabilis " without giving an 
example of this. Describing the Dutch prizes, 
rather like an auctioneer than a poet, he says 
that 

** Some English wool, vexed in a Belgian loom. 
And into cloth of spongy softness made. 
Did into France or colder Denmark doom. 
To ruin with worse ware our staple trade." 

One might fancy this written by the secretary 
of a board of trade in an unguarded moment ; 

and this, I believe, is the first application of the celestial por- 
tent to this particular comparison. Yet Milton's " imperial 
ensign " waves defiant behind his impregnable lines, and even 
Campbell flaunts his '♦ meteor flag" in Waller's face. Gray's 
bard might be sent to the lock-up, but even he would find bail. 

" C'est imiter quelqu'un que de planter des choux." 

"The lyrical cry" which has lately become as iteratively 
tedious in the fields of criticism as that of the cicala in those 
of Italy may perhaps be traced to the ♦* lyric-liring cries " of 
Sidney's Arcadia. 



DRYDEN. loi 

but we should remember that the poem Is dedi- 
cated to the city of London. The depreciation 
of the rival fabrics is exquisite ; and Dryden, the 
most English of our poets, would not be so 
thoroughly English if he had not in him some 
fibre of la nation boutiquiere. Let us now see 
how he succeeds in attempting to infuse science 
(the most obstinately prosy material) with poetry. 
Speaking of " a more exact knowledge of the 
longitudes," as he explains in a note, he tells 
us that, — 

** Then we upon our globe's last verge shall go. 
And view the ocean leaning on the sky; 
From thence our rolling neighbors we shall know. 
And on the lunar world securely pry." 

Dr. Johnson confesses that he does not under- 
stand this. Why should he, when it is plain that 
Dryden was wholly in the dark himself? To 
understand it is none of my business, but I con- 
fess that it interests me as an Americanism. We 
have hitherto been credited as the inventors of 
the "jumping-off place " at the extreme western 
verge of the world. But Dryden was beforehand 
with us. Though he doubtless knew that the 
earth was a sphere (and perhaps that it was flat- 
tened at the poles), it was always a flat surface 
in his fancy. In his " Amphitryon," he makes 
Alcmena say : — 

"No, I would fly thee to the ridge of earth. 
And leap the precipice to 'scape thy sight." 



I02 DRYDEN 

And in his " Spanish Friar," Lorenzo says to 
Elvira that they " will travel together to the 
ridge of the world, and then drop together into 
the next." It is idle for us poor Yankees to hope 
that we can invent anything. To say sooth, if 
Dryden had left nothing behind him but the 
" Annus Mirabilis," he might have served as 
a type of the kind of poet America would have 
produced by the biggest-river-and-tallest-moun- 
tain recipe, — longitude and latitude in plenty, 
with marks of culture scattered here and there 
like the carets on a proof-sheet. 

It is now time to say something of Dryden 
as a dramatist. In the thirty-two years between 
1662 and 1694 he produced twenty-five plays, 
and assisted Lee in two. I have hinted that it 
took Dryden longer than most men to find the 
true bent of his genius. On a superficial view, 
he might almost seem to confirm that theory, 
maintained by Johnson, among others, that gen- 
ius was nothing more than great intellectual power 
exercised persistently in some particular direction 
which chance decided, so that it lay in circum- 
stance merely whether a man should turn out a 
Shakespeare or a Newton. But when we come 
to compare what he wrote, regardless of Mi- 
nerva's averted face, with the spontaneous pro- 
duction of his happier muse, we shall be inclined 
to think his example one of the strongest cases 
against the theory in question. He began his 



DRYDEN 103 

dramatic career, as usual, by rowing against the 
strong current of his nature, and pulled only the 
more doggedly the more he felt himself swept 
down the stream. His first attempt was at com- 
edy, and, though his earliest piece of that kind 
(the "Wild Gallant," 1663) utterly failed, he 
wrote eight others afterwards. On the 23d Feb- 
ruary, 1663, Pepys writes in his diary: "To 
Court, and there saw the * Wild Gallant ' per- 
formed by the king's house ; but it was ill acted, 
and the play so poor a thing as I never saw in my 
life almost, and so little answering the name, that, 
from the beginning to the end, I could not, nor 
can at this time, tell certainly which was the Wild 
Gallant. The king did not seem pleased at all 
the whole play, nor anybody else." After some 
alteration, it was revived with more success. On 
its publication in 1669 Dryden honestly admit- 
ted its former failure, though with a kind of 
salvo for his self-love. " I made the town my 
judges, and the greater part condemned it. After 
which I do not think it my concernment to 
defend it with i:he ordinary zeal of a poet for his 
decried poem, though Corneille is more resolute 
in his preface before * Pertharite,' ' which was 
condemned more universally than this. . . . Yet 
it was received at Court, and was more than once 

' Corneille's tragedy of Pertharite was acted unsuccess- 
fully in 1659. Racine made free use of it in his more fortu- 
nate Andromaque. 



I04 DRYDEN 

the divertisement of his Majesty, by his own 
command." Pepys lets us amusingly behind 
the scenes in the matter of his Majesty's diver- 
tisement. Dryden does not seem to see that in 
the condemnation of something meant to amuse 
the public there can be no question of degree. 
To fail at all is to fail utterly. 

" Tous les genres sont permis, hors le genre ennuyeux." 
In the reading, at least, all Dryden's comic 
writing for the stage must be ranked with the 
latter class. He himself would fain make an 
exception of the " Spanish Friar," but I confess 
that I rather wonder at than envy those who 
can be amused by it. His comedies lack every- 
thing that a comedy should have, — lightness, 
quickness of transition, unexpectedness of inci- 
dent, easy cleverness of dialogue, and humorous 
contrast of character brought out by identity 
of situation. The comic parts of the " Maiden 
Queen " seem to me Dryden's best, but the 
merit even of these is Shakespeare's, and there 
is little choice where even the best is only tol- 
erable. The common quality, however, of ail 
Dryden's comedies is their nastiness, the more 
remarkable because we have ample evidence 
that he was a man of modest conversation. 
Pepys, who was by no means squeamish (for 
he found " Sir Martin Marall " " the most en- 
tire piece of mirth . . . that certainly ever was 
writ . . . very good wit therein, not fooling "), 



DRYDEN 105 

writes in his diary of the 19th June, 1668: 
" My wife and Deb to the king's playhouse 
to-day, thinking to spy me there, and saw the 
new play ' Evening Love,' of Dryden's, which, 
though the world commends, she likes not." 
The next day he saw it himself, " and do not 
Hke it, it being very smutty, and nothing so 
good as the ' Maiden Queen ' or the ' Indian 
Emperor ' of Dryden's making. / was troubled 
at ity On the 22d he adds : " Calling this day 
at Herringman's,' he tells me Dryden do him- 
self call it but a fifth-rate play." This was no 
doubt true, and yet, though Dryden in his pre- 
face to the play says, " I confess I have given 
[yielded] too much to the people in it, and am 
ashamed for them as well as for myself, that I 
have pleased them at so cheap a rate," he takes 
care to add, " not that there is anything here 
that I would not defend to an ill-natured judge." 
The plot was from Calderon, and the author, 
rebutting the charge of plagiarism, tells us that 
the king (" without whose command they should 
no longer be troubled with anything of mine") 
had already answered for him by saying, " that 
he only desired that they who accused me of 
theft would always steal him plays like mine." ^ 

' Dryden's publisher, 

^ It is curious how good things repeat themselves. When 
General Grant was accused of drinking too much, Mr. Lin- 
coln drily replied that " he wished all our generals might get 
hold of the same whiskey." 



io6 DRYDEN 

Of the morals of the play he has not a word, 
nor do I believe that he was conscious of any 
harm in them till he was attacked by Collier, 
and then (with some protest against what he 
considers the undue severity of his censor) 
he had the manliness to confess that he had 
done wrong. " It becomes me not to draw my 
pen in the defence of a bad cause, when I have 
so often drawn it for a good one." ' And in 
a letter to his correspondent, Mrs. Thomas, 
written only a few weeks before his death, warn- 
ing her against the example of Mrs. Behn, he 
says, with remorseful sincerity : " I confess 1 am 
the last man in the world who ought in justice 
to arraign her, who have been myself too much 
a libertine in most of my poems, which I should 
be well contented I had time either to purge 
or to see them fairly burned." Congreve was 
less patient, and even Dryden,in the last epilogue 
he ever wrote, attempts an excuse : — 

•' Perhaps the Parson stretched a point too far. 
When with our Theatres he waged a war; 
He tells you that this very moral age 
Received the first infection from the Stage, 
But sure a banished Court, with lewdness fraught, 
The seeds of open vice returning brought. 

Whitehall the naked Venus first revealed. 
Who, standing, as at Cyprus, in her shrine. 
The strumpet was adored with rites divine. 

' Preface to the Fables, 



DRYDEN 107 

The poets, who must live by Courts or starve. 
Were proud so good a Government to serve. 
And, mixing with buiFoons and pimps profane. 
Tainted the Stage for some small snip of gain." 

Dryden least of all men should have stooped 
to this palliation, for he had, not without jus- 
tice, said of himself: " The same parts and 
application which have made me a poet might 
have raised me to any honors of the gown." 
Milton and Marvell neither lived by the Court, 
nor starved. Charles Lamb most ingeniously 
defends the Comedy of the Restoration as " the 
sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry," 
where there was no pretence of representing 
a real world.' But this was certainly not so. 
Dryden again and again boasts of the superior 
advantage which his age had over that of the 
elder dramatists, in painting polite life, and 
attributes it to a greater freedom of intercourse 
between the poets and the frequenters of the 
Court.^ We shall be less surprised at the kind 
of refinement upon which Dryden congratulated 
himself, when we learn (from the dedication of 
" Marriage a la Mode ") that the Earl of 
Rochester was its exemplar : " The best comic 

' I interpret some otherwise ambiguous passages in this 
charming and acute essay by its tide: ** On the artificial 
comedy of the last century." 

2 See especially his defence of the epilogue to the Second 
Part of the Conquest of Granada (1672). 



io8 DRYDEN 

writers of our age will join with me to acknow- 
ledge that they have copied the gallantries of 
Courts, the delicacy of expression, and the de- 
cencies of behavior from your Lordship." In 
judging Dryden, it should be borne in mind 
that for some years he was under contract to 
deliver three plays a year, a kind of bond to 
which no man should subject his brain who has 
a decent respect for the quality of its products. 
We should remember, too, that in his d'a.j man- 
ners meant what we call morals^ that custom 
always makes a larger part of virtue among 
average men than they are quite aware, and that 
the reaction from an outward conformity which 
had no root in inward faith may for a time have 
given to the frank expression of laxity an air 
of honesty that made it seem almost refreshing. 
There is no such hotbed for excess of license 
as excess of restraint, and the arrogant fanati- 
cism of a single virtue is apt to make men sus- 
picious of tyranny in all the rest. But the riot 
of emancipation could not last long, for the 
more tolerant society is of private vice, the more 
exacting will it be of public decorum, that ex- 
cellent thing, so often the plausible substitute 
for things more excellent. By 1678 the public 
mind had so far recovered its tone that Dry- 
den's comedy of " Limberham " was barely 
tolerated for three nights. I will let the man 
who looked at human nature from more sides, 



DRYDEN 109 

and therefore judged it more gently than any 
other, give the only excuse possible for Dry- 
den : — 

" Men's judgments are 
A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward 
Do draw the inward quality after them 
To suffer all alike." 

Dryden's own apology only makes matters 
worse for him by showing that he committed his 
offences with his eyes wide open, and that he 
wrote comedies so wholly in despite of nature 
as never to deviate into the comic. Failing as 
clown, he did not scruple to take on himself the 
office of Chiffinch to the palled appetite of the 
public. " For I confess my chief endeavours 
are to delight the age in which I live. If the 
humour of this be for low comedy, small acci- 
dents, and raillery, I will force my genius to obey 
it, though with more reputation I could write in 
verse. I know I am not so fitted by nature to 
write comedy ; I want that gayety of humour 
which is requisite to it. My conversation is slow 
and dull, my humour saturnine and reserved : 
In short, I am none of those who endeavour to 
break jests in company or make repartees. So 
that those who decry my comedies do me no 
injury, except it be in point of profit : Reputa- 
tion in them is the last thing to which I shall 
pretend." ' For my own part, though I have 

' Defence of an Essay on Dramatick Poesy. 



no DRYDEN 

been forced to hold my nose in picking my way 
through these ordures of Dryden, I am free to 
say that I think them far less morally mischiev- 
ous than that corps-de-ballet literature in which 
the most animal of the passions is made more 
temptingly naked by a veil of French gauze. 
Nor does Dryden's lewdness leave such a reek 
in the mind as the filthy cynicism of Swift, who 
delighted to uncover the nakedness of our com- 
'mon mother. 

It is pleasant to follow Dryden into the more 
congenial region of heroic plays, though here 
also we find him making a false start. Anxious 
to please the king,' and so able a reasoner as to 
convince even himself of the justice of whatever 
cause he argued, he not only wrote tragedies in 
the French style, but defended his practice in 
an essay which is by far the most delightful re- 
production of the classic dialogue ever written 
in English. Eugenius (Lord Buckhurst), Lisi- 
deius (Sir Charles Sidley), Crites (Sir R. How- 
ard), and Neander (Dryden) are the four par- 
takers in the debate. The comparative merits 
of ancients and moderns, of the Shakespearian 
and contemporary drama, of rhyme and blank 
verse, the value of the three (supposed) Aristo- 

' "The favor which heroick plays have lately found upon 
our theatres has been wholly derived to them from the coun- 
tenance and approbation they have received at Court. ' ' ( Dedi- 
cation o{ Indian Emperor to Duchess of Monmouth.) 



DRYDEN 1 1 1 

telian unities, are the main topics discussed. The 
tone of the discussion is admirable, midway 
between bookishness and talk, and the fairness 
with which each side of the argument is treated 
shows the breadth of Dryden's mind perhaps 
better than any other one piece of his writing. 
There are no men of straw set up to be knocked 
down again, as there commonly are in debates 
conducted upon this plan. The " Defence " of 
the Essay is to be taken as a supplement to 
Neander's share in it, as well as many scattered 
passages in subsequent prefaces and dedications. 
All the interlocutors agree that " the sweetness 
of English verse was never understood or prac- 
tised by our fathers," and that " our poesy is 
much improved by the happiness of some writers 
yet living, who first taught us to mould our 
thoughts into easy and significant words, to 
retrench the superfluities of expression, and 
to make our rhyme so properly a part of the 
verse that it should never mislead the sense, 
but itself be led and governed by it." In another 
place he shows that by " living writers " he 
meant Waller and Denham. " Rhyme has all 
the advantages of prose besides its own. But 
the excellence and dignity of it were never fully 
known till Mr. Waller taught it : he first made 
writing easily an art ; first showed us to conclude 
the sense, most commonly in distiches, which 
in the verse before him runs on for so many lines 



,12 DRYDEN 

together that the reader is out of breath to over- 
take it." * Dryden afterwards changed his mind, 
and one of the excellences of his own rhymed 
verse is, that his sense is too ample to be con- 
cluded by the distich. Rhyme had been cen- 
sured as unnatural in dialogue ; but Dryden 
replies that it is no more so than blank verse, 
since no man talks any kind of verse in real 
life. But the argument for rhyme is of another 
kind. " I am satisfied if it cause delight, for 
delight is the chief if not the only end of poesy 
[he should have said means~\ ; instruction can be 
admitted but in the second place, for poesy only 
instructs as it delights. . . . The converse, there- 
fore, which a poet is to imitate must be height- 
ened with all the arts and ornaments of poesy, 
and must be such as, strictly considered, could 
never be supposed spoken by any without pre- 
meditation. . . . Thus prose, though the right- 
ful prince, yet is by common consent deposed 
as too weak for the government of serious plays, 
and, he failing, there now start up two competi- 
tors ; one the nearer in blood, which is blank 
verse ; the other more fit for the ends of gov- 
ernment, which is rhyme. Blank verse is, indeed, 
the nearer prose, but he is blemished with the 
weakness of his predecessor. Rhyme (for I will 
deal clearly) has somewhat of the usurper in 
him ; but he is brave and generous and his 
* Dedication of Rival Ladies. 



DRYDEN 113 > 

dominion pleasing." ' To the objection that the 
difficulties of rhyme will lead to circumlocution, 
he answers in substance, that a good poet will 
know how to avoid them. 

It is curious how long the superstition that 
Waller was the refiner of English verse has 
prevailed since Dryden first gave it vogue. He 
was a very poor poet and a purely mechanical 
versifier. He has lived mainly on the credit of 
his " Rose," of his " Girdle " (soiled with a vile 
pun), and of a single couplet, — 

•* The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed. 

Lets in new light through chinks that Time hath made," — 

in which the melody alone belongs to him, and 
the conceit, such as it is, to Samuel Daniel, who 
said, long before, that the body's 

♦* Walls, grown thin, permit the mind 
To look out thorough and his frailty find." 

Waller has made worse nonsense of it in the 
transfusion. It might seem that Ben Jonson 
had a prophetic foreboding of him when he 
wrote : *' Others there are that have no compo- 
sition at all, but a kind of tuning and rhyming 
fall. In what they write. It runs and slides and 
only makes a sound. Women's poets they are 
called, as you have women's tailors. 

' Defence of the Essay. Dryden, in the happiness of his illus- 
trative comparisons, is almost unmatched. Like himself, they 
occupy a middle ground between poetry and prose, — they 
are a cross between metaphor and simile. 



,,4 DRYDEN 

•♦They write a verse as smooth, as soft, as cream 
In which there is no torrent, nor scarce stream. 

You may sound these wits and find the depth 
of them with your middle-finger."' It seems 
to have been taken for granted by Waller, as 
afterwards by Dryden, that our elder poets be- 
stowed no thought upon their verse. "Waller 
was smooth," but unhappily he was also flat, 
and his importation of the French theory of the 
couplet as a kind of thought-coop did nothing 
but mischief. "* He never compassed even a 
smoothness approaching this description of a 
nightingale's song by a third-rate poet of the 
earlier school, — 

** Trails her plain ditty in one long-spun note 
Through the sleek passage of her open throat, 
A clear, unwrinkled song," — 

one of whose beauties is its running over into 
the third verse. Those poets indeed 

•* Felt music's pulse in all her arteries "; — 

' Discoveries. 

^ What a wretched rhymer he could be we may see in his 
alteration of the Maid'' s Tragedy of Beaumont and Fletcher: — 

" Not long since walking in the field, 
My nurse and I, we there beheld 
A goodly fruit ; which, tempting me, 
1 would have plucked ; but, trembling, she, 
Whoever eat those berries, cried, 
In less than half an hour died ! " 

What intolerable seesaw! Not much of Byron's "fatal 
facility " in these octosyllabics! 



DRYDEN 115 

and Dryden himself found out, when he came 
to try it, that blank verse was not so easy a 
thing as he at first conceived it, nay, that it is the 
most difficult of all verse, and that it must make 
up in harmony, by variety of pause and modu- 
lation, for what it loses in the melody of rhyme. 
In what makes the chief merit of his later versi- 
fication, he but rediscovered the secret of his 
predecessors in giving to rhymed pentameters 
something of the freedom of blank verse, and 
not mistaking metre for rhythm. 

Voltaire, in his Commentary on Corneille, 
has sufficiently lamented the awkwardness of 
movement imposed upon the French dramatists 
by the gyves of rhyme. But he considers the 
necessity of overcoming this obstacle, on the 
whole, an advantage. Difficulty is his tenth and 
superior muse. How did Dryden, who says 
nearly the same thing, succeed in his attempt at 
the French manner ? He fell into every one of 
its vices, without attaining much of what con- 
stitutes its excellence. From the nature of the 
language, all French poetry is purely artificial, 
and its high polish is all that keeps out decay. 
The length of their dramatic verse forces the 
French into much tautology, into bombast in 
its original meaning, the stuffing out a thought 
with words till it fills the line. The rigid system 
of their rhyme, which makes it much harder to 
manage than in English, has accustomed them 



ii6 DRYDEN 

to inaccuracies of thought which would shock 
them in prose. For example, in the " Cinna " of 
Corneille, as originally written, Emilie says to 
Augustus, — 

" Ces flammes dans nos cceurs des longtemps etoient nees, 
Et ce sont des secrets de plus de quatre annees." 

I say nothing of the second verse, which is 
purely prosaic surplusage exacted by the rhyme, 
nor of the jingling together of ceSy des^ etoienty 
neeSy des, and secrets^ but I confess that nees 
does not seem to be the epithet that Corneille 
would have chosen for flammes^ if he could 
have had his own way, and that flames would 
seem of all things the hardest to keep secret. 
But in revising, Corneille changed the first verse 
thus, — 

" Ces flammes dans nos coeurs sans votre ordre etoient nees." 

Can anything be more absurd than flames born 
to order? Yet Voltaire, on his guard against 
these rhyming pitfalls for the sense, does not 
notice this in his minute comments on this play. 
Of extravagant metaphor, the result of this same 
making sound the file-leader of sense, a single 
example from " Heraclius " shall suffice : — 

•* La vapeur de mon sang ira grossir la foudre 
Que Dieu tient deja prete a le reduire en poudre. " 

One cannot think of a Louis Quatorze Apollo 
except in a full-bottomed periwig, and the tragic 
style of their poets is always showing the disas- 



DRYDEN ,,7 

trous influence of that portentous comet. It is 
the style perruque in another than the French 
meaning of the phrase, and the skill lay in dress- 
ing it majestically, so that, as Cibber says, "upon 
the head of a man of sense, if it became him^ it 
could never fail of drawing to him a more par- 
tial regard and benevolence than could possibly 
be hoped for in an ill-made one." It did not 
become Dryden, and he left it off.' 

Like his own Zimri, Dryden was " all for " 
this or that fancy, till he took up with another. 
But even while he was writing on French mod- 
els, his judgment could not be blinded to their 
defects. " Look upon the * Cinna ' and the 

* Pompey,' they are not so properly to be called 
plays as long discourses of reason of State, and 

* Polieucte ' in matters of religion is as solemn 
as the long stops upon our organs ; . . . their 
actors speak by the hour-glass like our parsons. 
... I deny not but this may suit well enough 
with the French, for as we, who are a more 
sullen people, come to be diverted at our plays, 
so they, who are of an airy and gay temper, come 
thither to make themselves more serious." " 
With what an air of innocent unconsciousness 
the sarcasm is driven home ! Again, while he 
was still slaving at these bricks without straw, 

' In more senses than one. His last and best portrait shows 
him in his own gray hair. 
* Essay on Dramatick Poesy. 



ii8 DRYDEN 

he says : " The present French poets are gen- 
erally accused that, wheresoever they lay the 
scene, or in whatever age, the manners of their 
heroes are wholly French. Racine's Bajazet is 
bred at Constantinople, but his civilities are 
conveyed to him by some secret passage from 
Versailles into the Seraglio." It is curious that 
Voltaire, speaking of the " Berenice " of Ra- 
cine, praises a passage in it for precisely what 
Dryden condemns : " II semble qu'on entende 
Henriette d'Angleterre elle-meme parlant au 
marquis de Vardes. La politesse de la cour de 
Louis XIV., I'agrement de la langue Francaise, 
la douceur de la versification la plus naturelle, le 
sentiment le plus tendre, tout se trouve dans 
ce peu de vers." After Dryden had broken 
away from the heroic style, he speaks out more 
plainly. In the Preface to his " All for Love," 
in reply to some cavils upon " little, and not 
essential decencies," the decision about which he 
refers to a master of ceremonies, he goes on to 
say : " The French poets, I confess, are strict 
observers of these punctilios ; ... in this 
nicety of manners does the excellency of French 
poetry consist. Their heroes are the most civil 
people breathing, but their good breeding sel- 
dom extends to a word of sense. All their wit 
is in their ceremony ; they want the genius which 
animates our stage, and therefore 't is but neces- 
sary, when they cannot please, that they should 



DRYDEN 119 

take care not to offend. . . . They are so care- 
ful not to exasperate a critic that they never 
leave him any work, . . . for no part of a poem 
is worth our discommending where the whole 
is insipid, as when we have once tasted palled 
wine we stay not to examine it glass by glass. 
But while they affect to shine in trifles, they are 
often careless in essentials. . . . For my part, 
I desire to be tried by the laws of my own coun- 
try." This is said in heat, but it is plain enough 
that his mind was wholly changed. In his dis- 
course on epic poetry he is as decided, but more 
temperate. He says that the French heroic 
verse " runs with more activity than strength.' 
Their language is not strung with sinews like 
our English ; it has the nimbleness of a grey- 
hound, but not the bulk and body of a mastiff. 
Our men and our verses overbear them by their 
weight, and pondere^ non numeroy is the British 
motto. The French have set up purity for the 
standard of their language, and a masculine vigor 
is that of ours. Like their tongue is the genius 

' A French hendecasyllable verse runs exactly like our ballad 
measure : — 

A cobbler there was and he lived in a stall, . . . 
La ratson, pour marcher^ n a sou-vent qu une "voye. 

(Dryden's note.) 

The verse is not a hendecasyllable. " Attended watchfully 
to her recitative (Mile. Duchesnois), and find that, in nine 
lines out of ten, 'A cobbler there was,' etc., is the tune of 
the French heroics." (^Moore' s Diary, 24th April, 1821.) 



I20 DRYDEN 

of their poets, — light and trifling in comparison 
of the EngUsh." ' 

Dryden might have profited by an admirable 
saving of his own, that " they who would com- 
bat general authority with particular opinion 
must first establish themselves a reputation of 
understanding better than other men." He 
understood the defects much better than the 
beauties of the French theatre. Lessing was 
even more one-sided in his judgment upon it.* 
Goethe, with his usual wisdom, studied it care- 
fully without losing his temper, and tried to 
profit by its structural merits. Dryden, with his 
eyes wide open, copied its worst faults, especially 
its declamatory sentiment. He should have 
known that certain things can never be trans- 
planted, and that among these is a style of 
poetry whose great excellence was that it was in 

' " The language of the age is never the language of poetry, 
except among the French, whose verse, v\'here the thought or 
image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose."' 
(Gray to West.) 

2 Diderot and Rousseau, however, thought their language 
unfit for poetry, and Voltaire seems to have half agreed with 
them. No one has expressed this feeling more neatly than 
Fauriel: " Nul doute que Ton ne puisse dire en prose des 
choses eminemment poetiques, tout comme il n'est que trop 
certain que Ton peut en dire de fort prosaiques en vers, et 
meme en excellents vers, en vers elegamment tournes, et en 
beau langage. C'est un fait dont je n'ai pas besoin d'indiquer 
d'exemples: aucune litterature n'en fournirait autant que le 
notre." {^Histoire de la Po'esie Proven^ale, ii. 237.) 



DRYDEN 121 

perfect sympathy with the genius of the people 
among whom it came into being. But the truth 
is, that Dryden had no aptitude whatever for the 
stage, and in writing for it he was attempting to 
make a trade of his genius, — an arrangement 
from which the genius always withdraws in dis- 
gust. It was easier to make loose thinking and 
the bad writing which betrays it pass unobserved 
while the ear was occupied with the sonorous 
music of the rhyme to which they marched. 
Except in " All for Love," " the only play," he 
tells us, "which he wrote to please himself,"' 
there is no trace of real passion in any of his 
tragedies. This, indeed, is inevitable, for there 
are no characters, but only personages, in any 
except that. That is, in many respects, a noble 
play, and there are few finer scenes, whether 
in the conception or the carrying out, than that 
between Antony and Ventidius in the first act.^ 
As usual. Dry den's good sense was not blind 
to the extravagances of his dramatic style. In 
" Mac Flecknoe " he makes his own Maximin 
the type of childish rant, — 

"And little Maximins the gods defy "; — 

* Parallel of Poetry and Painting. 

' " II y a seulement la scene de Ventidius et d'Antoine qui 
est digne de Corneille. C'est la le sentiment de milord Bo- 
lingbroke et de tous les bons auteurs; c'est ainsi que pensait 
Addisson." (Voltaire to M. de Fromont, 15th November, 
I735-) 



122 DRYDEN 

but, as usual also, he could give a plausible rea- 
son for his own mistakes by means of that most 
fallacious of all fallacies which is true so far as it 
goes. In his Prologue to the " Royal Martyr " 
he says : — 

** And he who servilely creeps after sense 
Is safe, but ne'er will reach an excellence. 

But, when a tyrant for his theme he had. 
He loosed the reins and let his muse run mad. 
And, though he stumbles in a full career. 
Yet rashness is a better fault than fear; 

They then, who of each trip advantage take. 

Find out those faults which they want wit to make." 

And in the Preface to the same play he tells us : 
" I have not everywhere observed the quality 
of numbers in my verse, partly by reason of my 
haste, but more especially because I would not 
have my sense a slave to syllables.^' Dryden, when 
he had not a bad case to argue, would have 
had small respect for the wit whose skill lay in 
the making of faults, and has himself, where his 
self-love was not engaged, admirably defined the 
boundary which divides boldness from rashness. 
What Quintilian says of Seneca applies very 
aptly to Dryden : " Velles eum suo ingenio 
dixisse, alieno judicio." * He was thinking of 
himself, I fancy, when he makes Ventidius say 
of Antony, — 

» Inst. X., i. 129. 



DRYDEN 123 

** He starts out wide 
And bounds into a vice that bears him far 
From his first course, and plunges him in ills; 
But, when his danger makes him find his fault, 
Quick to observe, and full of sharp remorse. 
He censures eagerly his own misdeeds. 
Judging himself with malice to himself. 
And not forgiving what as man he did 
Because his other parts are more than man." 

But bad though they nearly all are as wholes, 
his plays contain passages which only the great 
masters have surpassed, and to the level of 
which no subsequent writer for the stage has 
ever risen. The necessity of rhyme often forced 
him to a platitude, as where he says, — 

** My love was blind to your deluding art. 

But blind men feel when stabbed so near the heart." ' 

But even in rhyme he not seldom justifies his 
claim to the title of "glorious John." In the 
very play from which I have just quoted are 
these verses in his best manner : — 

"No, like his better Fortune I '11 appear. 
With open arms, loose veil, and flowing hair. 
Just flying forward from her rolling sphere." 

His comparisons, as I have said, are almost 
always happy. This, from the " Indian Em- 
peror," is tenderly pathetic : — 

*• As callow birds. 
Whose mother 's killed in seeking of the prey. 
Cry in their nest and think her long away, 

' Conquest of Granada, Second Part. 



124 DRYDEN 

And, at each leaf that stirs, each blast of wind. 
Gape for the food which they must never find." 

And this, of the anger with which the Maiden 
Queen, striving to hide her jealousy, betrays 
her love, is vigorous : — 

♦• Her rage was love, and its tempestuous flame. 

Like lightning, showed the heaven from whence it came." 

The following simile from the " Conquest 
of Granada " is as well expressed as it is apt in 
conception: — 

** I scarcely understand my own intent; 

But, silk-worm like, so long within have wrought. 
That I am lost in my own web of thought." 

In the " Rival Ladies," Angelina, walking in 
the dark, describes her sensations naturally and 
strikingly : — 

•* No noise but what my footsteps make, and they 
Sound dreadfully and louder than by day: 
They double too, and every step I take 
Sounds thick, methinks, and more than one could make." 

In all the rhymed plays ' there are many 
passages which one is rather inclined to like than 
sure he would be right in liking them. The fol- 
lowing verses from " Aurengzebe " are of this 
sort : — 

•' My love was such it needed no return. 
Rich in itself, like elemental fire. 
Whose pureness does no aliment require." 

' In most, he mingles blank verse. 



DRYDEN 125 

This is Cowleyish, and pureness is surely the 
wrong word ; and yet it is better than mere 
commonplace. Perhaps what oftenest turns the 
balance in Dryden's favor, when we are weigh- 
ing his claims as a poet, is his persistent cap- 
ability of enthusiasm. To the last he kindles, 
and sometimes almost flashes out that super- 
natural light which is the supreme test of poetic 
genius. As he himself so finely and character- 
istically says in " Aurengzebe," there was no 
period in his life when it was not true of him 
that 

*' He felt the inspiring heat, the absent god return." 

The verses which follow are full of him, and, 
with the exception of the single word underwent, 
are in his luckiest manner : — 

'* One loose, one sally of a heroe's soul. 
Does all the military art control. 
While timorous wit goes round, or fords the shore. 
He shoots the gulf, and is already o'er. 
And, when the enthusiastic fit is spent. 
Looks back amazed at what he underwent." ' 

Pithy sentences and phrases always drop from 
Dryden's pen as if unawares, whether in prose or 
verse. I string together a few at random : — 

"The greatest argument for love is love." 
** Few know the use of life before 't is past." 
"Time gives himself and is not valued." 

' Conquest of Granada. 



126 DRYDEN 

♦Death in itself is nothing; but we fear 
To be we know not what, we know not where.** 

* Love either finds equality or makes it; 

Like death, he knows no difference in degrees.** 

* That 's empire, that which I can give away." 

' Yours is a soul irregularly great. 
Which, wanting temper, yet abounds in heat." 

* Forgiveness to the injured does belong. 

But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong.** 

* Poor women's thoughts are all extempore." 

* The cause of love can never be assigned, 
'Tis in no face, but in the lover's mind." ' 

' Heaven can forgive a crime to penitence. 
For Heaven can judge if penitence be true; 
But man, who knows not hearts, should make examples. 

' Kings' titles commonly begin by force. 
Which time wears off and mellows into right.'* 

* Fear's a large promiser; who subject live 

To that base passion, know not what they give." 

' The secret pleasure of the generous act 
Is the great mind's great bribe." 

«*That bad thing, gold, buys all good things." 

' Why, love does all that 's noble here below.'* 

** To prove religion true. 
If either wit or sufferings could suffice, 
All faiths afford the constant and the wise." 

' This recalls a striking verse of Alfred de Musset: — 
" La muse est toujours belle, 
Meme pour Tinsense, meme pour'l'impuissant, 
Car sa beaute pour nous, c'est notre amour pour elk.'" 



DRYDEN 127 

But Dryden, as he tells us himself, — 

♦* Grew weary of his long-loved mistress. Rhyme; 
Passion 's too fierce to be in fetters bound. 
And Nature flies him like enchanted ground." 

The finest things in his plays were written in 
blank verse, as vernacular to him as the alexan- 
drine to the French. In this he vindicates his 
claim as a poet. His diction gets wings, and both 
his verse and his thought become capable of a 
reach which was denied them when set in the 
stocks of the couplet. The solid man becomes 
even airy in this new-found freedom : Antony 
says, — 

" How I loved. 
Witness ye days and nights, and all ye hours 
That danced away with down upon your feet. ^* 

And what image was ever more delicately ex- 
quisite, what movement more fadingly accord- 
ant with the sense, than in the last two verses of 
the following passage ? 

*'I feel death rising higher still and higher. 
Within my bosom; every breath I fetch 
Shuts up my life within a shorter compass. 
And, like the vanishing sound of bells, grows less 
And less each pulse, till it be lost in air. ' ' ' 

Nor was he altogether without pathos, though 
it is rare with him. The following passage seems 
to me tenderly full of it : — 

' Rival Ladies. 



128 DRYDEN 

** Something like 
That voice methinks, I should have somewhere heard; 
But floods of woe have hurried it far off 
Beyond my ken of soul." ' 

And this single verse from " Aurengzebe ": — 

" Live still ! oh live ! live even to be unkind ! " 

with its passionate eagerness and sobbing repe- 
tition, is worth a ship-load of the long-drawn 
treacle of modern self-compassion. 

Now and then, to be sure, we come upon some- 
thing that makes us hesitate again whether, after 
all, Dryden was not grandiose rather than great, 
as in the two passages that next follow : — 

** He looks secure of death, superior greatness. 
Like Jove when he made Fate and said. Thou art 
The slave of my creation." ^ 

** I 'm pleased with my own work; Jove was not more 
With infant nature, when his spacious hand 
Had rounded this huge ball of earth and seas. 
To give it the first push and see it roll 
Along the vast abyss." 3 

I should say that Dryden is more apt to di- 
late our fancy than our thought, as great poets 
have the gift of doing. But if he have not the 
potent alchemy that transmutes the lead of our 
commonplace associations into gold, as Shake- 
speare knows how to do so easily, yet his sense 
is always up to the sterling standard ; and though 

' Don Sebastian. * Ibid. 3 Cleomenes. 



DRYDEN 129 

he has not added so much as some have done 
to the stock of bullion which others afterwards 
coin and put in circulation, there are few who 
have minted so many phrases that are still a part 
of our daily currency. The first line of the fol- 
lowing passage has been worn pretty smooth, 
but the succeeding ones are less familiar : — 

** Men are but children of a larger growth. 
Our appetites as apt to change as theirs. 
And full as craving too and full as vain; 
And yet the soul, shut up in her dark room. 
Viewing so clear abroad, at home sees nothing; 
But, like a mole in earth, busy and blind. 
Works all her folly up and casts it outward 
In the world's open view." ' 

The image is mixed and even contradictory, 
but the thought obtains grace for it. I feel as if 
Shakespeare would have written seeing for view- 
ing^ thus gaining the strength of repetition in 
one verse and avoiding the sameness of it in the 
other. Dryden, I suspect, was not much given 
to correction, and indeed one of the great charms 
of his best writing is that everything seems struck 
off at a heat, as by a superior man in the best 
mood of his talk. Where he rises, he generally 
becomes fervent rather than imaginative ; his 
thought does not incorporate itself in metaphor, 
as in purely poetic minds, but repeats and rein- 
forces itself in simile. Where he is imaginative, 

' All for Love. 



130 DRYDEN 

it is in that lower sense which the poverty of 
our language, for want of a better word, com- 
pels us to call picturesque^ and even then he 
shows little of that finer instinct which suggests 
so much more than it tells, and works the more 
powerfully as it taxes more the imagination of 
the reader. In Donne's " Relic" there is an 
example of what I mean. He fancies some one 
breaking up his grave and spying 

** A bracelet of bright hair about the bone," — 

a verse that still shines there in the darkness of 
the tomb, after two centuries, like one of those 
inextinguishable lamps whose secret is lost.' Yet 
Dryden sometimes showed a sense of this magic 
of a mysterious hint, as in the " Spanish 
Friar": — 

*♦ No, I confess, you bade me not in words; 
The dial spoke not, but it made shrewd signs. 
And pointed full upon the stroke of murder." 

This is perhaps a solitary example. Nor is he 
always so possessed by the image in his mind 
as unconsciously to choose even the pictur- 

' Dryden, with his wonted perspicacity, follows Ben Jon- 
son in calling Donne " the greatest wit, though not the best 
poet, of our nation." (Dedication o^ Eleonora.^ Even as a 
poet Donne 

" Had in him those brave translunary things 
That our first poets had." 

To open vistas for the imagination through the blind wall of 
the senses, as he could sometimes do, is the supreme function 
of poetry. 



DRYDEN 131 

esquely imaginative word. He has done so, 
however, in this passage from " Marriage a la 
Mode": — 

" You ne'er must hope again to see your princess. 
Except as prisoners view fair walks and streets. 
And careless passengers going by their grates." 

But after all, he is best upon a level, table-land, 
it is true, and a very high level, but still some- 
where between the loftier peaks of inspiration 
and the plain of every-day life. In those passages 
where he moralizes he is always good, setting 
some obvious truth in a new light by vigorous 
phrase and happy illustration. Take this (from 
" CEdipus ") as a proof of it : — 

'* The gods are just. 
But how can finite measure infinite ? 
Reason ! alas, it does not know itself ! 
Yet man, vain man, would with his short-lined plummet 
Fathom the vast abyss of heavenly justice. 
Whatever is, is in its causes just. 
Since all things are by fate. But purblind man 
Sees but a part o' th' chain, the nearest links. 
His eyes not carrying to that equal beam 
That poises all above." 

From the same play I pick an illustration of 
that ripened sweetness of thought and language 
which marks the natural vein of Dryden. One 
cannot help applying the passage to the late Mr. 
Quincy: — 



132 DRYDEN 

*' Of no distemper, of no blast he died. 

But fell like autumn fruit that mellowed long. 
E'en wondered at because he dropt no sooner; 
Fate seemed to wind him up for fourscore years; 
Yet freshly ran he on ten winters more. 
Till, hke a clock worn out with eating Time, 
The wheels of weary life at last stood still." ' 

Here is another of the same kind from " All for 
Love " : — 

** Gone so soon! 
Is Death no more ? He used him. carelessly. 
With a familiar kindness; ere he knocked. 
Ran to the door and took him in his arms. 
As who should say. You 're welcome at all hours, 
A friend need give no warning." 

With one more extract from the same play, which 
is in every way his best, for he had, when he wrote 
it, been feeding on the bee-bread of Shakespeare, 
I shall conclude. Antony says, — 

** For I am now so sunk from what I was. 
Thou find'st me at my lowest water-mark. 
The rivers that ran in and raised my fortunes 
Are all dried up, or take another course: 
What I have left is from my native spring; 
I 've a heart still that swells in scorn of Fate, 
And lifts me to my banks." 

This is certainly, from beginning to end, in what 
used to be called the grand style, at once noble 
and natural. I have not undertaken to analyze 
any one of the plays, for (except in " AH for 

' My own judgment is my sole warrant for attributing these 
extracts from (Edipus to Dryden rather than Lee. 



DRYDEN 133 

Love ") it would have been only to expose their 
weakness. Dry den had no constructive faculty ; 
and in every one of his longer poems that re- 
quired a plot, the plot is bad, always more or less 
inconsistent with itself, and rather hitched-on to 
the subject than combining with it. It is fair 
to say, however, before leaving this part of Dry- 
den's literary work, that Home Tooke thought 
" Don Sebastian " " the best play extant." ' 
Gray admired the plays of Dryden, "not as dra- 
matic compositions, but as poetry." ^ " There 
are as many things finely said in his plays as 
almost by anybody," said Pope to Spence. Of 
their rant, their fustian, their bombast, their bad 
English, of their innumerable sins against Dry- 
den's own better conscience both as poet and 
critic, I shall excuse myself from giving any 
instances.^ I like what is good in Dryden so 

' Recollections of Rogers, p. 165. 

2 Nicholls's Reminiscences of Gray. Pickering's edition of 
Gray's Works, vol. v. p. 35. 

3 Let one suffice for all. In the Royal Martyr, Porphyrius, 
waiting his execution, says to Maximin, who had wished him 
for a son-in-law: — 

*' Where'er thou stand' st, I '11 level at that place 
My gushing blood, and spout it at thy face ; 
Thus not by marriage we our blood will join ; 
Nay, more, my arms shall throw my head at thine." 

** It is no shame," says Dryden himself, "to be a poet, 
though it is to be a bad one." Cibber seems to say that the 
audience could not help laughing at Dryden' s Rhodomontades 
as he calls them. 



134 DRYDEN 

much, and it is so good, that I think Gray was 
justified in always losing his temper when he 
heard " his faults criticised.".' 

It is as a satirist and pleader in verse that 
Dryden is best known, and as both he is in some 
respects unrivalled. His satire is not so sly as 
Chaucer's, but it is distinguished by the same 
good nature. There is no malice in it. I shall 
not enter into his literary quarrels further than 
to say that he seems to me, on the whole, to have 
been forbearing, which is the more striking as he 
tells us repeatedly that he was naturally vindic- 
tive. It was he who called revenge " the darling 
attribute of heaven." " I complain not of their 
lampoons and libels, though I have been the 
public mark for many years. I am vindictive 
enough to have repelled force by force, if I could 
imagine that any of them had ever reached me." 
It was this feeling of easy superiority, I suspect, 
that made him the mark for so much jealous 
vituperation. Scott is wrong in attributing his 
onslaught upon Settle to jealousy because one 
of the latter's plays had been performed at Court, 
— an honor never paid to any of Dryden's.,' 

' Gray, ul>i supra, p. 38. 

2 Scott had never seen Pepys's Diary when he wrote this, 
or he would have left it unwritten: ** Fell to discourse of the 
last night's work at Court, where the ladies and Duke of 
Monmouth acted the Indian Emperor wherein they told me 
these things most remarkable that not any woman but the 
Duchess of Monmouth and Mrs. Cornwallis did anything but 



DRYDEN 135 

I have found nothing Hke a trace of jealousy in 
that large and benignant nature. In his vindi- 
cation of the " Duke of Guise,'* he says, with 
honest confidence in himself: " Nay, I durst 
almost refer myself to some of the angry poets 
on the other side, whether I have not rather 
countenanced and assisted their beginnings than 
hindered them from rising." He seems to have 
been really as indifferent to the attacks on him- 
self as Pope pretended to be. In the same 
vindication he says of the" Rehearsal," the only 
one of them that had any wit in it, and it has 
a great deal : " Much less am I concerned at the 
noble name of Bayes ; that's a brat so like his 
own father that he cannot be mistaken for any 
other body. They might as reasonably have 
called Tom Sternhold Virgil, and the resem- 
blance would have held as well." In his " Essay 
on Satire " he says : " And yet we know that in 
Christian charity all offences are to be forgiven 
as we expect the like pardon for those we daily 
commit against Almighty God. And this con- 
sideration has often made me tremble when I 
was saying our Lord's Prayer; for the plain con- 
dition of the forgiveness which we beg is the par- 
doning of others the offences which they have 

like fools and stocks, but that these two did do most extraor- 
dinary T^ell; that not any man did anything well but Captain 
O' Bryan, who spoke and did well, but above all things did 
dance most incomparably." ( 1 4th January, 1668.) • 



136 DRYDEN 

done to us ; for which reason I have many times 
avoided the commission of that fault, even when 
1 have been notoriously provoked." ' And in 
another passage he says, with his usual wisdom : 
" Good sense and good nature are never sep- 
arated, though the ignorant world has thought 
otherwise. Good nature, by which I mean bene- 
ficence and candor, is the product of right reason, 
which of necessity will give allowance to the 
failings of others, by considering that there is 
nothing perfect in mankind." In the same Es- 
say he gives his own receipt for satire : " How 
easy it is to call rogue and villain, and that wit- 
tily ! but how hard to make a man appear a fool, 
a blockhead, or a knave, without using any of 
those opprobrious terms ! . . . This is the mys- 
tery of that noble trade. . . . Neither is it true 
that this fineness of raillery is offensive : a witty 
man is tickled while he is hurt in this manner, 
and a fool feels it not. . . . There is a vast dif- 
ference between the slovenly butchering of a 
man and the fineness of a stroke that separates 
the head from the body, and leaves it standing 
in its place. A man may be capable, as Jack 
Ketch's wife said of his servant, of a plain piece 
of work, of a bare hanging ; but to make a male- 
factor die sweetly was only belonging to her 

' See also that noble passage in The Hind and the Panther 
(1573-1591), where this is put into verse. Dry den always 
thought in prose. 



DRYDEN 137 

husband. I wish I could apply it to myself, if 
the reader would be kind enough to think it 
belongs to me. The character of Zimri in my 
* Absalom ' is, in my opinion, worth the whole 
poem. It is not bloody, but it is ridiculous 
enough, and he for whom it was intended was 
too witty to resent it as an injury. ... I 
avoided the mention of great crimes, and ap- 
plied myself to the representing of blind sides 
and little extravagances, to which, the wittier 
a man is, he is generally the more obnoxious." 
Dryden thought his genius led him that way. 
In his elegy on the satirist Oldham, whom 
Hallam, without reading him, I suspect, ranks 
next to Dryden,' he says: — 

** For sure our souls were near allied, and thine 
Cast in the same poetic mould with mine; 
One common note in either lyie did strike, 
And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike." 

His practice is not always so delicate as his 
theory ; but if he was sometimes rough, he never 
took a base advantage. He knocks his antag- 
onist down, and there an end. Pope seems to 
have nursed his grudge, and then, watching his 
chance, to have squirted vitriol from behind a 
corner, rather glad than otherwise if it fell on 

^ Probably on the authority of this very epitaph, as if epi- 
taphs were to be believed even under oath! A great many 
authors live because we read nothing but their tombstones. 
Oldham was, to borrow one of Dryden's phrases, "a. bad 
or, which is worse, an indifferent poet." 



138 DRYDEN 

the women of those he hated or envied. And 
if Dryden is never dastardly, as Pope often was, 
so also he never wrote anything so maliciously 
depreciatory as Pope's unprovoked attack on 
Addison. Dryden's satire is often coarse, but 
where it is coarsest, it is commonly in defence 
of himself against attacks that were themselves 
brutal. Then, to be sure, he snatches the first 
ready cudgel, as in Shadwell's case, though even 
then there is something of the good humor 
of conscious strength. Pope's provocation was 
too often the mere opportunity to say a biting 
thing, where he could do it safely. If his victim 
showed fight, he tried to smooth things over, as 
with Dennis and Hill. Dryden could forget that 
he had ever had a quarrel, but he never slunk 
away from any, least of all from one provoked 
by himself' Pope's satire is too much occupied 
with the externals of manners, habits, personal 
defects, and peculiarities. Dryden goes right 
to the rooted character of the man, to the 
weaknesses of his nature, as where he says of 
Burnett : — 

** Prompt to assail, and careless of defence. 
Invulnerable in his impudence. 
He dares the world, and, eager of a name. 
He thrusts about znd justks into fame. 

• ** He was of a nature exceedingly humane and compas- 
sionate, easily forgiving injuries, and capable of a prompt and 
sincere reconciliation Wwh them that had offended him." 
(Congreve.) 
Ill 



DRYDEN 139 

So fond of loud report that, not to miss 
Of being known (his last and utmost bliss). 
He rather would be known for what he is." 

It would be hard to find in Pope such com- 
pression of meaning as in the first, or such 
penetrative sarcasm as in the second of the 
passages I have underscored. Dryden's satire 
is still quoted for its comprehensiveness of ap- 
plication, Pope's rather for the elegance of its 
finish and the point of its phrase than for any- 
deeper qualities/ I do not remember that Dry- 
den ever makes poverty a reproach/ He was 
above it, alike by generosity of birth and mind. 
Pope is always the parvenu, always giving him- 
self the airs of a fine gentleman, and, like Horace 
Walpole and Byron, affecting superiority to pro- 

' Coleridge says excellently: "You will find this a good 
gauge or criterion of genius, — whether it progresses and 
evolves, or only spins upon itself. Take Dryden's Achitophel 
and Zimri; every line adds to or modifies the character, which 
is, as it were, a-building up to the very last verse; whereas in 
Pope's Timon, etc., the first two or three couplets contain all 
the pith of the character, and the twenty or thirty lines that 
follow are so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealousy, 
or pride, or whatever it may be that is satirized." (^Table- 
Talk, 192.) Some of Dryden's best satirical hits are let fall 
by seeming accident in his prose, as where he says of his 
Protestant assailants, '♦ Most of them love all whores but her 
of Babylon." They had first attacked him on the score of his 
private morals. 

^ That he taxes Shadwell with it is only a seeming excep- 
tion, as any careful reader will see. 



HO . DRYDEN 

fessional literature. Dry den, like Lessmg,was a 
hack-writer, and was proud, as an honest man 
has a right to be, of being able to get his bread 
by his brains. He lived in Grub Street all his 
life, and never dreamed that where a man of 
genius lived was not the best quarter of the 
town. " Tell his Majesty," said sturdy old 
Jonson, "that his soul lives in an alley." 

Dry den's prefaces are a mine of good writing 
and judicious criticism. His obiter dicta have 
often the penetration, and always more than the 
equity, of Voltaire's, for Dryden never loses 
temper, and never altogether qualifies his judg- 
ment by his self-love. " He was a more uni- 
versal writer than Voltaire," said Home Tooke, 
and perhaps it is true that he had a broader view, 
though his learning was neither so extensive nor 
so accurate. My space will not afford many ex- 
tracts, but I cannot forbear one or two. He says 
of Chaucer, that " he is a perpetual fountain of 
good sense," ' and likes him better than Ovid, 
— a bold confession in that day. He prefers 
the pastorals of Theocritus to those of Virgil. 
" Virgil's shepherds are too well read in the 
philosophy of Epicurus and of Plato " ; " there 
is a kind of rusticity in all those pompous 
verses, somewhat of a holiday shepherd strut- 
ting in his country buskins " ; ^ " Theocritus is 

' Preface to Fables. 

' Dedication of the Georgics. 



DRYDEN HI 

softer than Ovid, he touches the passions more 
delicately, and performs all this out of his own 
fund, without diving into the arts and sciences 
for a supply. Even his Doric dialect has an 
incomparable sweetness in his clownishness, like 
a fair shepherdess, in her country russet, talk- 
ing in a Yorkshire tone." ' Comparing Virgil's 
verse with that of some other poets, he says, 
that his " numbers are perpetually varied to 
increase the delight of the reader, so that the 
same sounds are never repeated twice together. 
On the contrary, Ovid and Claudian, though 
they write in styles different from each other, 
yet have each of them but one sort of music 
in their verses. All the versification and little 
variety of Claudian is included within the com- 
pass of four or five lines, and then he begins 
again in the same tenor, perpetually closing his 
sense at the end of a verse, and that verse com- 
monly which they call golden, or two substan- 
tives and two adjectives with a verb betwixt 
them to keep the peace. Ovid, with all his 
sweetness, has as little variety of numbers and 
sound as he ; he is always, as it were, upon the 
hand-gallop, and his verse runs upon carpet- 
ground." ^ What a dreary half century would 
have been saved to English poetry, could Pope 
have laid these sentences to heart, who, accord- 

' Preface to Second Miscellany, 
» Ibid. 



142 DRYDEN 

ing to Spence, " learned versification wholly 
from Dryden's works " ! Upon translation, no 
one has written so much and so well as Dryden 
in his various prefaces. Whatever has been said 
since is either expansion or variation of what he 
had said before. His general theory may be 
stated as an aim at something between the literal- 
ness of metaphrase and the looseness of para- 
phrase. " Where I have enlarged," he says, " I 
desire the false critics would not always think 
that those thoughts are wholly mine, but either 
they are secretly in the poet^ or may be fairly 
deduced from him." Coleridge, with his usual 
cleverness of assimilation^ has condensed him in 
a letter to Wordsworth : " There is no medium 
between a prose version and one on the avowed 
principle of compensation in the widest sense, i. e. 
manner, genius, total effect." ' 

I have selected these passages, not because 
they are the best, but because they have a near 
application to Dryden himself. His own char- 
acterization of Chaucer (though too narrow for 
the greatest but one of English poets) is the 
best that could be given of himself: " He is a 
perpetual fountain of good sense." And the 
other passages show him a close and open- 
minded student of the art he professed. Has 
his influence on our literature, but especially on 
our poetry, been on the whole for good or evil ? 
' Memoirs of Wordsworth, \o\.\\.Y>' 74 (American edition). 



DRYDEN H3 

If he could have been read with the liberal un- 
derstanding which he brought to the works of 
others, I should answer at once that it had been 
beneficial. But his translations and paraphrases, 
in some ways the best things he did, were done, 
like his plays, under contract to deliver a certain 
number of verses for a specified sum. The ver- 
sification, of which he had learned the art by 
long practice, is excellent, but his haste has led 
him to fill out the measure of lines with phrases 
that add only to dilute, and thus the clearest, 
the most direct, the most manly versifier of his 
time became, without meaning it, the source 
{fons et origo malorum) of that poetic diction from 
which our poetry has not even yet recovered. 
I do not like to say it, but he has sometimes 
smothered the child-like simplicity of Chaucer 
under feather-beds of verbiage. What this kind 
of thing came to in the next century, when 
everybody ceremoniously took a bushel-basket 
to bring a wren's egg to market in, is only too 
sadly familiar. It is clear that his natural taste 
led Dryden to prefer directness and simplicity 
of style. If he was too often tempted astray by 
Artifice, his love of Nature betrays itself in many 
an almost passionate outbreak of angry remorse. 
Addison tells us that he took particular delight 
in the reading of our old English ballads. What 
he valued above all things was Force, though 
in his haste he is willing to make a shift with its 



144 DRYDEN 

counterfeit, Effect. As usual, he had a good 
reason to urge for what he did : " I will not 
excuse, but justify myself for one pretended 
crime for which I am liable to be charged by 
false critics, not only in this translation, but in 
many of my original poems, — that I Latinize 
too much. It is true that when 1 find an English 
word significant and sounding, I neither borrow 
from the Latin or any other language ; but when 
I want at home I must seek abroad. If sound- 
ing words are not of our growth and manufacture, 
who shall hinder me to import them from a 
foreign country ? I carry not out the treasure 
of the nation which is never to return ; but what 
I bring from Italy I spend in England : here 
it remains, and here it circulates ; for if the coin 
be good, it will pass from one hand to another. 
I trade both with the living and the dead for 
the enrichment of our native language. We 
have enough in England to supply our necessity; 
but if we will have things of magnificence and 
splendor, we m.ust get them by commerce. . . . 
Therefore, if I find a word in a classic author, I 
propose it to be naturalized by using it myself, 
and if the public approve of it the bill passes. 
But every man cannot distinguish betwixt ped- 
antry and poetry ; every man, therefore, is not 
fit to innovate." ' This is admirably said, and 

■ A Discourse of Epick Poetry. " If the public approve." 
«* On ne peut pas admettre dans le developpement des Ian- 



DRYDEN H5 

with Dryden's accustomed penetration to the 
root of the matter. The Latin has given us 
most of our canorous words, only they must 
not be confounded with merely sonorous ones, 
still less with phrases that, instead of supple- 
menting the sense, encumber it. It was of 
Latinizing in this sense that Dryden was guilty. 
Instead of stabbing, he "with steel invades 
the life." The consequence was that by and 
by we have Dr. Johnson's poet, Savage, telling 
us, — 

*' In front, a parlor meets my entering view. 
Opposed a room to sweet refection due " ; — 

Dr. Blacklock making a forlorn maiden say of 
her "dear," who is out late, — 

«* Or by some apoplectic fit deprest 

Perhaps, alas! he seeks eternal rest" ; — 

and Mr. Bruce, in a Danish war-song, calling 
on the Vikings to " assume their oars." But it 
must be admitted of Dryden that he seldom 
makes the second verse of a couplet the mere 
trainbearer to the first, as Pope was continually 
doing. In Dryden the rhyme waits upon the 
thought; in Pope and his school the thought 
curtsys to the tune for which it is written. 

gues aucune revolution artificielle et sciemment executee; il 
n'y a pour elles ni conciles, ni assemblees deliberantes; on 
neles reforme pas comma une constitution vicieuse." (Renan, 
De P Origine du Langage, p. 95.) 



146 DRYDEN 

Dryden has also been blamed for his galli- 
cisms.' He tried some, it is true, but they have 
not been accepted. I do not think he added a 
single word to the language, unless, as I suspect, 
he first used magnetism in its present sense of 
moral attraction. What he did in his best writ- 
ing was to use the English as if it were a spoken, 
and not merely an inkhorn language ; as if it 
were his own to do what he pleased with it, as 
if it need not be ashamed of itself.^ In this re- 
spect, his service to our prose was greater than 
any other man has ever rendered. He says he 
formed his style upon Tillotson's (Bossuet, on 
the other hand, formed his upon Corneille's) ; 
but I rather think he got it at Will's, for its 
great charm is that it has the various freedom of 

' This is an old complaint. Puttenham sighs over such 
innovation in Elizabeth's time, and Carew in James's. A 
language grows, and is not made. Almost all the new-fangled 
words with which Johnson in his Poetaster taxes Marston are 
now current. 

2 Like most idiomatic, as distinguished from correct writers, 
he knew very little about the language historically or critically. 
His prose and poetry swarm with locutions that would have 
made Lindley Murray's hair stand on end. How little he 
knew is plain from his criticising in Ben Jonson the use of one's 
in the plural, of " Though Heaven should speak with all his 
wrath," and be "as false English for are, though the rhyme 
hides it." Yet all are good English, and I have found them 
all in Dryden' s own waiting ! Of his sins against idiom I have 
a longer list than I have room for. And yet he is one of our 
highest authorities for real English. 



DRYDEN 147 

talk.' In verse, he had a pomp which, excellent 
in itself, became pompousness in his imitators. 
But he had nothing of Milton's ear for various 
rhythm and interwoven harmony. He knew 
how to give new modulation, sweetness, and 
force to the pentameter ; but in what used to 
be called pindarics, I am heretic enough to think 
he generally failed. His so much praised "Alex- 
ander's Feast " (in parts of it, at least) has no 
excuse for its slovenly metre and awkward ex- 
pression, but that it was written for music. He 
himself tells us, in the epistle dedicatory to 
*' King Arthur," " that the numbers of poetry 
and vocal music are sometimes so contrary, that 
in many places I have been obliged to cramp my 
verses and make them rugged to the reader that 
they may be harmonious to the hearer." His 
renowned ode suffered from this constraint, but 
this is no apology for the vulgarity of concep- 
tion in too many passages.^ 

' To see what he rescued us from in pedantry on the one 
hand, and vulgarism on the other, read Feltham and Tom 
Brown — if you can. 

^ " Cette ode, mise en musique par Purcell (si je ne me 
trompe), passe en Angleterre pour le chef-d' ceuvre de la 
poesie la plus sublime et la plus variee; et je vous avoue que, 
comme je sais mieux I'anglais que le grec, j'aime cent fois 
mieux cette ode que tout Pindare." (Voltaire to M. de 
Chabanon, 9 mars, 1772.) 

Dryden would have agreed with Voltaire. When Chief- 
Justice Marlay, then a young Templar, "congratulated him 



h8 dryden 

Dryden's conversion to Romanism has been 
commonly taken for granted as insincere, and 
has therefore left an abiding stain on his charac- 
ter, though the other mud thrown at him by 
angry opponents or rivals brushed off so soon as 
it was dry. But I think his change of faith sus- 
ceptible of several explanations, none of them in 
any way discreditable to him. Where Church 
and State are habitually associated, it is natural 
that minds even of a high order should uncon- 
sciously come to regard religion as only a subt- 
ler mode of police.' Dryden, conservative by 
nature, had discovered before Joseph de Maistre, 
that Protestantism, so long as it justified its name 
by continuing to be an active principle, was the 
abettor of Republicanism, perhaps the vanguard 
of Anarchy. I think this is hinted in more than 
one passage in his preface to " The Hind and 
the Panther." He may very well have preferred 
Romanism because of its elder claim to author- 
ity In all matters of doctrine, but I think he had 
a deeper reason in the constitution of his own 
mind. That he was " naturally inclined to scep- 
ticism In philosophy," he tells us of himself in 

on having produced the finest and noblest Ode that had ever 
been written in any language, * You are right, young gentle- 
man [replied Dryden], a nobler Ode never was produced, 
nor ever w/7/.' " (Malone.) 

' This was true of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and still more 
of Southey, who in some respects was not unlike Dryden. 



DRYDEN H9 

the Preface to the *' ReHgio Laid " ; but he was 
a sceptic with an imaginative side, and in such 
characters scepticism and superstition play into 
each other's hands. This finds a curious illus- 
tration in a letter to his sons, written four years 
before his death : " Towards the latter end of 
this month, September, Charles will begin to 
recover his perfect health, according to his Na- 
tivity, which, casting it myself, I am sure is true, 
and all things hitherto have happened accord- 
ingly to the very time that I predicted them." 
Have we forgotten Montaigne's votive offerings 
at the shrine of Loreto ? 

Dryden was short of body, inclined to stout- 
ness, and florid of complexion. He is said to 
have had " a sleepy eye," but was handsome 
and of a manly carriage. He " was not a very 
genteel man, he was intimate with none but poet- 
ical men.' He was said to be a very good man 
by all that knew him : he was as plump as Mr. 
Pitt, of a fresh color and a down look, and not 
very conversible." So Pope described him to 
Spence. He was friendly to rising merit, as to 

' Pope's notion of gentility was perhaps expressed in a letter 
from Lord Cobham to him: " I congratulate you upon the fine 
weather. 'Tis a strange thing that people of condition and 
men of parts must enjoy it in common with the rest of the 
world." (RufFhead's Pope, p. 276, note.) His Lordship's 
naive distinction between people of condition and men of parts 
is as good as Pope's between genteel and poetical men. I fancy 
the poet grinning savagely as he read it. 



I50 DRYDEN 

Congreve, for instance. Cibber says he was a 
poor reader. He still reigns in literary tradition, 
as when at Will's' his elbow-chair had the best 
place by the fire in winter, or on the balcony in 
summer, and when a pinch from his snuff-box 
made a young author blush with pleasure as 
would nowadays a favorable notice in the " Sat- 
urday Review." What gave and secures for him 
this singular eminence ? To put it in a single 
word, I think that his qualities and faculties were 
in that rare combination which makes character. 
This g^YQ. flavor to whatever he wrote — a very 
rare quality. 

Was he, then, a great poet? Hardly, in the 
narrowest definition. But he was a strong thinker 
who sometimes carried common sense to a height 
where it catches the light of a diviner air, and 
warmed reason till it had well-nigh the illuminat- 
ing property of Intuition. Certainly he is not, 
like Spenser, the poets' poet, but other men have 
also their rights. Even the Philistine is a man 
and a brother, and is entirely right so far as he 
sees. To demand more of him is to be unrea- 
sonable. And he sees, among other things, that 
a man who undertakes to write should first have 
a meaning perfectly defined to himself, and then 
should be able to set it forth clearly in the best 

* ** This may confine their younger styles ' 

Whom Dry den pedagogues at Will's." 

(Prior, Epistle to Shephard, 1689.) 



DRYDEN 151 

words. This is precisely Dryden's praise,' and 
amid the rickety sentiment looming big through 
misty phrase which marks so much of modern 
literature, to read him is as bracing as a north- 
west wind. He blows the mind clear. In mind 
and manner his foremost quality is energy. In 
ripeness of mind and bluff heartiness of expres- 
sion, he takes rank with the best. His phrase is 
always a short cut to his sense, for his estate was 
too spacious for him to need that trick of wind- 
ing the path of his thought about, and planting 
it out with clumps of epithet, by which the land- 
scape-gardeners of literature give to a paltry 
half acre the air of a park. In poetry, to be 
next-best is, in one sense, to be nothing; and 
yet to be among the first in any kind of writing, 
as Dryden certainly was, is to be one of a very 
small company. He had, beyond most, the 
gift of the right word. And if he does not, 
like one or two of the greater masters of song, 
stir our sympathies by that indefinable aroma 
so magical in arousing the subtile associations 
of the soul, he has this in common with the 
few great writers, that the winged seeds of his 
thought embed themselves in the memory and 
germinate there. If I could be guilty of the 
absurdity of recommending to a young man any 

• "Nothing is truly sublime," he himself said, " that is 
not just and proper." Sir Henry Wotton said of Sidney that 
** his wit was the very measure of congruity. " 



152 DRYDEN 

author on whom to form his style, I should tell 
him that, next to having something that will not 
stay unsaid, he could find no safer guide than 
Dryden, 

Cowper, in a letter to Mr. Unwin (5th Janu- 
ary, 1782), expresses what I think is the com- 
mon feeling about Dryden, that, with all his 
defects, he had that indefinable something we call 
Genius. " But I admire Dryden most [he had 
been speaking of Pope], who has succeeded by 
mere dint of genius, and in spite of a laziness 
and a carelessness almost peculiar to himself. 
His faults are numberless, and so are his beau- 
ties. His faults are those of a great man, and 
his beauties are such (at least sometimes) as 
Pope with all his touching and retouching could 
never equal." But, after all, perhaps no man 
has summed him up so well as John Dennis, 
one of Pope's typical dunces, a dull man outside 
of his own sphere, as men are apt to be, but who 
had some sound notions as a critic, and thus 
became the object of Pope's fear and therefore 
of his resentment. Dennis speaks of him as his 
" departed friend, whom I infinitely esteemed 
when living for the solidity of his thought, for 
the spring and the warmth and the beautiful turn 
of it; for the power and variety and fulness of 
his harmony ; for the purity, the perspicuity, the 
energy of his expression ; and, whenever these 
great qualities are required, for the pomp and 



DRYDEN 153 

solemnity and majesty of his style." ' And yet 
there is something unhappily suggestive in what 
Congreve accidentally lets drop in describing his 
funeral, where, he says, " We had an ode in 
Horace sung instead of David's Psalms." His 
burial, he tells us, " was the same with his life: 
variety and not of a piece ; the quality and mob ; 
farce and heroics ; the sublime and ridicule mixt 
in a piece ; great Cleopatra in a hackney-coach." 
I know not how true this may be, but the last 
phrase better characterizes Dryden's poetry in 
four words than a page of disquisition could. 
But he knew how to " give his soul a loose," 
and ours too, as only the great know. 

' Dennis, in a letter to Tonson, 1 7 1 5 . 



POPE 

1871 

THE condition of the English mind at 
the close of the seventeenth century 
was such as to make it particularly sen- 
sitive to the magnetism which streamed to it 
from Paris. The loyalty of everybody both 
in politics and religion had been put out of 
joint. A generation of materialists, by the 
natural rebound which inevitably follows over- 
tension, was to balance the ultra-spiritualism of 
the Puritans. As always when a political revo- 
lution has been wrought by moral agencies, the 
plunder had fallen mainly to the share of the 
greedy, selfish and unscrupulous, whose dis- 
gusting cant had given a taint of hypocrisy to 
piety itself. Religion, from a burning convic- 
tion of the soul, had grown to be with both 
parties a political badge, as little typical of the 
inward man as the scallop of a pilgrim. Sin- 
cerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole 
being, and the pretence of it saps the very foun- 
dation of character. There seems to have been 
an universal scepticism, and in its worst form, 
that is, with an outward conformity in the inter- 
est of decorum and order. There was an unbe- 
lief that did not believe even in itself. 



POPE 155 

The difference between the leading minds of 
the former age and that which was supplanting 
it went to the very roots of the soul. Milton 
was willing to peril the success of his crowning 
work by making the poetry of it a stalking-horse 
for his theological convictions. What was that 
Fame 

"Which the clear spirit doth raise 
To scorn delights and live laborious days " — 

to the crown of a good preacher who sets 

" The hearts of men on fire 
To scorn the sordid world and unto heaven aspire " ? 

Dean Swift, who aspired to the mitre, could 
write a book whose moral, if it had any, was 
that one religion .was as good as another, since 
all were political devices, and accepted a cure 
of souls when it was more than doubtful whether 
he believed that his fellow creatures had any 
souls to be saved, or, if they had, whether they 
were worth saving. The answer which Pulci's 
Margutte makes to Morgante, when asked if 
he believed in Christ or Mahomet, would have 
expressed well enough the creed of the majority 
of that generation : — 

" To tell thee truly. 
My faith in black 's no greater than in azure. 

But I believe in capons, roast-meat, bouilli. 
And in good wine my faith 's beyond all measure." * 

' Morgante, xs\\\. 115. 



156 POPE 

It was a carnival of intellect without faith, when 
men could be Protestant or Catholic, both at 
once, or by turns, or neither, as suited their 
interest, when they could swear one allegiance 
and keep on safe terms with the other, when 
prime ministers and commanders-in-chief could 
be intelligencers of the Pretender, nay, wh-en 
even Algernon Sidney himself could be a pen- 
sioner of France. What morality there was, 
was the morality of appearances, of the side 
that is turned toward men and not toward God. 
The very shamelessness of Congreve is refresh- 
ing in that age of sham. 

It was impossible that anything truly great, 
that is, great on the moral and emotional as well 
as the intellectual side, should be produced by 
such a generation. But something intellectually 
great could be and was. The French mind, al- 
ways stronger in perceptive and analytic than in 
imaginative qualities, loving precision, grace, and 
finesse, prone to attribute an almost magical 
power to the scientific regulation whether of 
politics or religion, had brought wit and fancy 
and the elegant arts of society to as great per- 
fection as was possible by the a priori method. 
Its ideal in literature was to conjure passion 
within the magic circle of courtliness, or to com- 
bine the appearance of careless ease and gayety 
of thought with intellectual exactness of state- 
ment. The eternal watchfulness of a wit that 



POPE 157 

never slept had made it distrustful of the natural 
emotions and the unconventional expression 
of them, and its first question about a senti- 
ment was, Will it be safe ? about a phrase. Will 
it pass with the Academy ? The effect of its 
example on English literature would appear 
chiefly in neatness and facility of turn, in point 
and epigrammatic compactness of phrase, and 
these in conveying conventional sentiments and 
emotions, in appealing to good society rather 
than to human nature. Its influence would be 
greatest where its success had been most marked, 
in what was called moral poetry, whose chosen 
province was manners, and in which satire, with 
its avenging scourge, took the place of that pro- 
founder art whose office it was to purify, not 
the manners, but the source of them in the soul, 
by pity and terror. The mistake of the whole 
school of French criticism, it seems to me, lay 
in its tendency to confound what was common 
with what was vulgar, in a too exclusive defer- 
ence to authority at the expense of all free move- 
ment of the mind. 

There are certain defects of taste which cor- 
rect themselves by their own extravagance. Lan- 
guage, I suspect, is more apt to be reformed by 
the charm of some master of it, like Milton, 
than by any amount of precept. The influence 
of second-rate writers for evil is at best ephem- 
eral, for true style, the joint result of culture 



158 POPE 

and natural aptitude, is always in fashion, as fine 
manners always are, in whatever clothes. Per- 
haps some reform was needed when Quarles, 
who had no mean gift of poesy, could write, — 

** My passion has no April in her eyes: 
I cannot spend in mists; I cannot mizzle; 
My fluent brains are too severe to drizzle 
Slight drops." ' 

Good taste is an excellent thing when it confines 
itself to its own rightful province of the proprie- 
ties, but when it attempts to correct those pro- 
found instincts out of whose judgments the 
higher principles of esthetics have been formu- 
lated, its success is a disaster. During the era 
when the French theory of poetry was supreme, 
we notice a decline from imagination to fancy, 
from passion to wit, from metaphor, which fuses 
image and thought in one, to simile, which sets 
one beside the other, from the supreme code 
of the natural sympathies to the parochial by- 
laws of etiquette. The imagination instinctively 
Platonizes, and it is the essence of poetry that 
it should be unconventional, that the soul of 

* Elegie on Doctor Wilson. But if Quarles had been led 
astray by the vices of Donne's manner, he had good company 
in Herbert and Vaughan. In common with them, too, he had 
that luck of simpleness which is even more delightful than wit. 
In the same poem he says, — 

" Go, glorious soul, and lay thy temples down 
In Abram's bosom, in the sacred doivn 
Of ioft eternity. ' ' 



POPE 159 

it should subordinate the outward parts; while 
the artificial method proceeds from a principle 
the reverse of this, making the spirit lackey the 
form. 

Waller preaches up this new doctrine in the 
epilogue to the " Maid's Tragedy " : — 

" Nor is 't less strange such mighty wits as those 
Should use a style in tragedy like prose; 
Well-sounding verse, where princes tread the stage. 
Should speak their virtue and describe their rage." 

That it should be beneath the dignity of princes 
to speak in anything but rhyme can only be 
paralleled by Mr. Puff's law that a heroine can 
go decorously mad only in white satin. Waller, 
I suppose, though with so loose a thinker one 
cannot be positive, uses " describe " in its Latin 
sense of limitation. Fancy Othello or Lear con- 
lined to this go-cart ! Phillips touches the true 
point when he says, " And the truth is, the use 
of measure alone, without any rime at all, would 
give far more ample scope and liberty both to 
style and fancy than can possibly be observed 
in rime." ' But let us test Waller's method by 
an example or two. His monarch made reason- 
able thus discourses : — 

" Courage our greatest failings does supply. 
And makes all good, or handsomely we die. 
Life is a thing of common use; by heaven 
As well to insects as to monarchs given; 

' Preface to the T heat rum. 



i6o POPE 

But for the crown, 'tis a more sacred thing; 

I '11 dying lose it, or I '11 live a king. 

Come, Diphilus, we must together walk 

And of a matter of importance talk." ^Exeunt. 

Blank verse, where the sentiment is trivial as 
here, merely removes prose to a proper ideal 
distance, where it is in keeping with more im- 
passioned parts, but commonplace set to this 
rocking-horse jog irritates the nerves. There is 
nothing here to remind us of the older tragic 
style but the exeunt at the close. Its pithy con- 
ciseness and the relief which it brings us from 
his majesty's prosing give it an almost poetical 
savor. Aspatia's reflections upon suicide (or 
"suppressing our breath," as she calls it), in 
the same play, will make few readers regret that 
Shakespeare was left to his own unassisted bar- 
barism when he wrote Hamlet's soliloquy on 
the same topic : — 

*• 'Twas in compassion of our woe 
That Nature first made poisons grow. 
For hopeless wretches such as I 
Kindly providing means to die: 
As mothers do their children keep. 
So Nature feeds and makes us sleep. 
The indisposed she does invite 
To go to bed before 't is night." 

Correctness in this case is but a synonym of 
monotony, and words are chosen for the num- 
ber of their syllables, for their rubbishy value 



POPE i6i 

to fill-in, instead of being forced upon the poet 
by the meaning which occupies the mind. Lan- 
guage becomes useful for its diluting properties, 
rather than as the medium by means of which 
the thought or fancy precipitate themselves in 
crystals upon a connecting thread of purpose. 
Let us read a few verses from Beaumont and 
Fletcher, that we may feel fully the difference 
between the rude and the reformed styles. This 
also shall be a speech of Aspatia's. Antiphila, 
one of her maidens, is working the story of 
Theseus and Ariadne in tapestry, for the older 
masters loved a picturesque background and 
knew the value of fanciful accessories. Aspatia 
thinks the face of Ariadne not sad enough : — 

" Do it by me. 
Do it again by me, the lost Aspatia, 
And you shall find all true but the wild island. 
Suppose I stand upon the seabeach now. 
Mine arms thus, and my hair blown with the wind. 
Wild as that desert; and let all about me 
Be teachers of my story. Do my face 
(If ever thou hadst feeling of a sorrow) 
Thus, thus, Antiphila; strive to make me look 
Like sorrow's monument; and the trees about me 
Let them be dry and leafless; let the rocks 
Groan with continual surges; and behind me 
Make all a desolation." 

What instinctive felicity of versification I what 
sobbing breaks and passionate repetitions are 
here ! 



i62 POPE 

We see what the direction of the new tend- 
ency was, but it would be an inadequate or a 
dishonest criticism that should hold Pope re- 
sponsible for the narrow compass of the instru- 
ment which was his legacy from his immediate 
predecessors, any more than for the wearisome 
thrumming-over of his tune by those who came 
after him and who had caught his technical skill 
without his genius. The question properly stated 
is, How much was it possible to make of the 
material supplied by the age in which he lived ? 
and how much did he make of it ? Thus far, 
among the great English poets who preceded 
him, we have seen actual life represented by 
Chaucer, imaginative life by Spenser, ideal life 
by Shakespeare, the interior life by Milton. 
But as everything aspires to a rhythmical utter- 
ance of itself, so conventional life, itself a new 
phenomenon, was waiting for its poet. It found 
or made a most fitting one in Pope. He stands 
for exactness of intellectual expression, for per- 
fect propriety of phrase (I speak of him at his 
best), and is a striking instance how much suc- 
cess and permanence of reputation depend on 
conscientious finish as well as on native endow- 
ment. Butler asks, — 

*•' Then why should those who pick and choose 
The best of all the best compose. 
And join it by Mosaic art. 
In graceful order, part to part. 



POPE 163 

To make the whole in beauty suit. 
Not merit as complete repute 
As those who, with less art and pain. 
Can do it with their native brain ? " 

Butler knew very well that precisely what stamps 
a man as an artist is this power of finding out 
what is " the best of all the best." 

I confess that I come to the treatment of 
Pope with diffidence. I was brought up in the 
old superstition that he was the greatest poet 
that ever lived ; and when 1 came to find that 
I had instincts of my own, and my mind was 
brought in contact with the apostles of a more 
esoteric doctrine of poetry, I felt that ardent 
desire for smashing the idols I had been brought 
up to worship, without any regard to their artis- 
tic beauty, which characterizes youthful zeal. 
What was it to me that Pope was called a master 
of style? I felt, as Addison says in his "Free- 
holder " when answering an argument in favor 
of the Pretender because he could speak English 
and George I. could not, "that I did not wish 
to be tyrannized over in the best English that 
ever was spoken." The young demand thoughts 
that find an echo in their real and not their 
acquired nature, and care very little about the 
dress they are put in. It is later that we learn 
to like the conventional, as we do olives. There 
was a time when I could not read Pope, but dis- 
liked him on principle, as old Roger Ascham 



1 64 POPE 

seems to have felt about Italy when he says, 
" I was once in Italy myself, but I thank God 
my abode there was only nine days." 

But Pope fills a very important place in the 
history of English poetry, and must be studied 
by every one who would come to a clear know- 
ledge of it. I have since read over every line 
that Pope ever wrote, and every letter written 
by or to him, and that more than once. If I 
have not come to the conclusion that he is the 
greatest of poets, I believe that I am at least in 
a condition to allow him every merit that is 
fairly his. I have said that Pope as a literary 
man represents precision and grace of expres- 
sicm ; but as a poet he represents something 
more, — nothing less, namely, than one of those 
eternal controversies of taste which will last 
as long as the imagination and understanding 
divide men between them. It is not a matter to 
be settled by any amount of argument or demon- 
stration. There are born Popists or Words- 
worthians, Lockists or Kantists, and there is 
nothing more to be said of the matter. 

Wordsworth was not in a condition to do 
Pope justice. A man brought up in sublime 
mountain solitudes, and whose nature was a soli- 
tude more vast than they, walking on earth 
which quivered with the throe of the French 
Revolution, the child of an era of profound 
mental and moral movement, it could not be 



POPE 165 

expected that he should be in sympathy with 
the poet of artificial life. Moreover, he was 
the apostle of imagination, and came at a time 
when the school which Pope founded had de- 
generated into a mob of mannerists who wrote 
with ease, and who with their congenial critics 
united at once to decry poetry which brought 
in the dangerous innovation of having a soul 
in it. 

But however it may be with poets, it is very 
certain that a reader is happiest whose mind is 
broad enough to enjoy the natural school for its 
nature, and the artificial for its artificiality, pro- 
vided they be only good of their kind. At any 
rate, we must allow that the man who can pro- 
duce one perfect work is either a great genius or 
a very lucky one ; and so far as we who read are 
concerned, it is of secondary importance which. 
And Pope has done this in the "Rape of the 
Lock." For wit, fancy, invention, and keeping, 
it has never been surpassed. I do not say there 
is in it poetry of the highest order, or that 
Pope is a poet whom any one would choose as 
the companion of his best hours. There is no 
inspiration in it, no trumpet-call, but for pure 
entertainment it is unmatched. There are two 
kinds of genius. The first and highest may be 
said to speak out of the eternal to the present, 
and must compel its age to understand // ; the 
second understands its ^ge, and tells it what it 



1 66 POPE 

wishes to be told. Let us find strength and 
inspiration in the one, amusement and instruc- 
tion in the other, and be honestly thankful for 
both. 

The very earliest of Pope's productions give 
indications of that sense and discretion, as well as 
wit, which afterward so eminently distinguished 
him. The facility of expression is remarkable, 
and we find also that perfect balance of metre, 
which he afterward carried so far as to be weari- 
some. His pastorals were written in his six- 
teenth year, and their publication immediately 
brought him into notice. The following four 
verses from his first pastoral are quite character- 
istic in their antithetic balance : — 

** You that, too wise for pride, too good for power. 
Enjoy the glory to be great no more. 
And carrying with you all the world can boast. 
To all the world illustriously are lost!" 

The sentiment is affected, and reminds one of 
that future period of Pope's Correspondence 
with his Friends, when Swift, his heart corrod- 
ing with disappointed ambition at Dublin, 
Bolingbroke raising delusive turnips at his 
farm, and Pope pretending not to feel the 
lampoons which embittered his life, played to- 
gether the solemn farce of affecting indifference 
to the world by which it would have agonized 
them to be forgotten, and wrote letters ad- 
dressed to each other, but really intended for 



POPE 167 

that posterity whose opinion they assumed to 
despise. 

In these pastorals there is an entire want 
of nature. For example, in that on the death of 
Mrs. Tempest : — 

♦• Her fate is whispered by the gentle breeze 
And told in sighs to all the trembling trees; 
The trembling trees, in every plain and wood. 
Her fate remurmur to the silver flood; 
The silver flood, so lately calm, appears 
Swelled with new passion, and o'erflows with tears; 
The winds and trees and floods her death deplore. 
Daphne, our grief! our glory now no more ! " 

All this is as perfectly professional as the mourn- 
ing of an undertaker. Still worse, Pope materi- 
alizes and makes too palpably objective that 
sympathy which our grief forces upon outward 
nature. Milton, before making the echoes 
mourn for Lycidas, puts our feelings in tune, 
as it were, and hints at his own imagination as 
the source of this emotion in inanimate things, — 

*♦ But, O the heavy change now thou art gone!" 

In " Windsor Forest " we find the same thing 
again : — 

** Here his first lays majestic Denham sung, 

There the last numbers flowed from Cowley's tongue; 
O early lost, what tears the river shed 
When the sad pomp along his banks was led! 
His drooping swans on every note expire. 
And on his '"illows hung each muse's lyre!" 



i68 POPE 

In the same poem he indulges the absurd 
conceit that, — 

** Beasts urged by us, their fellow beasts pursue. 
And learn of man each other to undo " ; — 

and in the succeeding verses gives some striking 
instances of that artificial diction, so inappropri- 
ate to poems descriptive of natural objects and 
ordinary life, which brought verse-making to 
such a depth of absurdity in the course of the 
century. 

** With slaughtering guns, the unwearied fowler roves 
Where frosts have whitened all the naked groves; 
Where doves in flocks the leafless trees o'ershade. 
And lonely woodcocks haunt the watery glade; 
He lifts the tube and levels with his eye. 
Straight a short thunder breaks the frozen sky: 
Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath. 
The clamorous lapwings feel the leaden death; 
Oft as the mounting larks their notes prepare. 
They fall and leave their little lives in air." 

Now one would imagine that the tube of the 
fowler was a telescope instead of a gun. And 
think of the larks preparing their notes like a 
country choir ! Yet even here there are admir- 
able lines, — 

•' Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath," 

" They fall and leave their Httle lives in air," — 

for example. 

In Pope's next poem, the " Essay on Criti- 
cism," the wit and poet become apparent. It is 



POPE 169 

full of clear thoughts, compactly expressed. In 
this poem, written when Pope was only twenty- 
one, occur some of those lines which have be- 
come proverbial ; such as 

*' A little learning is a dangerous thing"; 

** For fools rush in where angels fear to tread "; 

** True wit is Nature to advantage dressed. 

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.** 

** For each ill author is as bad a friend." 

In all of these we notice that terseness in which 
(regard being had to his especial range of thought) 
Pope has never been equalled. One cannot help 
being struck also with the singular discretion 
which the poem gives evidence of. I do not 
know where to look for another author in whom 
it appeared so early; and, considering the vi- 
vacity of his mind and the constantly besetting 
temptation of his wit, it is still more wonderful. 
In his boyish correspondence with poor old 
Wycherley, one would suppose him to be the 
man and Wycherley the youth. Pope's under- 
standing was no less vigorous (when not the 
dupe of his nerves) than his fancy was light- 
some and sprightly. 

I come now to what in itself would be enough 
to have immortalized him as a poet, the " Rape 
of the Lock," in which, indeed, he appears more 
purely as poet than in any other of his produc- 
tions. Elsewhere he has shown more force, more 



lyo POPE 

wit, more reach of thought, but nowhere such a 
truly artistic combination of elegance and fancy. 
His genius has here found its true direction, 
and the very same artificiality, which in his pas- 
torals was unpleasing, heightens the effect, and 
adds to the general keeping. As truly as Shake- 
speare is the poet of man, as God made him, 
dealing with great passions and innate motives, 
so truly is Pope the poet of society, the deline- 
ator of manners, the exposer of those motives 
which may be called acquired, whose spring is 
in institutions and habits of purely worldly 
origin. 

The " Rape of the Lock " was written in 
Pope's twenty-fourth year, and the machinery of 
the Sylphs was added at the suggestion of Dr. 
Garth, — a circumstance for which we can feel 
a more unmixed gratitude to him than for writ- 
ing the " Dispensary." The idea was taken from 
that entertaining book " The Count de Gabalis," 
in which Fouque afterward found the hint for 
his " Undine " ; but the little sprites as they 
appear in the poem are purely the creation of 
Pope's fancy. 

The theory of the poem is excellent. The 
heroic is out of the question in fine society. It 
is perfectly true that almost every door we 
pass in the street closes upon its private tragedy, 
but the moment a great passion enters a man 
he passes at once out of the artificial into the 



POPE 171 

human. So long as he continues artificial, the 
sublime is a conscious absurdity to him. The 
mock-heroic then is the only way in which the 
petty actions and sufferings of the fine world 
can be epically treated, and the contrast continu- 
ally suggested with subjects of larger scope and 
more dignified treatment, makes no small part 
of the pleasure and sharpens the point of the 
wit. The invocation is admirable: — 

** Say, what strange motive. Goddess, could compel, 
A well-bred lord to assault a gentle belle ? 
O say what stranger cause, yet unexplored. 
Could make a gentle belle reject a lord ? " 

The keynote of the poem is here struck, and we 
are able to put ourselves in tune with it. It is not 
a. parody of the heroic style, but only a setting 
it in satirical juxtaposition with cares and events 
and modes of thought with which it is in com- 
ical antipathy, and while it is not degraded, they 
are shown in their triviality. The " clouded 
cane," as compared with the Homeric spear, 
indicates the difference of scale, the lower plane 
of emotions and passions. The opening of the 
action, too, is equally good : — 

"Sol through white curtains shot a timorous ray. 
And oped those eyes that must eclipse the day. 
Now lapdogs give themselves the rousing shake. 
And sleepless lovers just at twelve awake; 
Thrice rung the bell, the slipper knocked the ground. 
And the pressed watch returned a silver sound.'*' 



1-2 POPE 

The mythology of the Sylphs is flill of the most 
fanciful wit ; indeed, wir infused with fancv is 
Pope's peculiar merit. The Svlph is addressing 

Belinda : — 

T-e5e. ::::-;- -rrrr-. are ever ;- :-f -^ ""c. 

As now your ov^ r. :_: :.-_ -r :: ; ;. 

And once encloses Li^ v^\.:i.az.' : :r _ r: ^ — ru^i: 

Think not, when woman's traEii;: :-r .r ;. r;i, 

That all her ranities at once are dead; 

Succeeding vanities she still regards. 

And, though she plays no nuHe, o'o^looks the cards. 

For when the fair in all their pride expire. 

To their first elements their souls retire; 

The S|xites of fiery termagants in flame 

Moont up and take a salamander's name; 

Soft yielding nrraphs to water glide away 

And sip, with nymphs, their elemental tea; 

The grayer pmde anks downward to a gnome. 

In search of mischief still on earth to roam; 

The fight coquettes in sylphs aloft rq>air 

And ^MHt and flutter in the fields of air." 

And the contrivance br which Belinda is awak- 
ened is also perfectlv in keeping with all the 
rest of the machinerv : — 

** Hf ^--■-- " '-— ?hock, who thoo^t she slept tec Ici-g^ 
L : ~iked his mistress with his tongue; 

'1 vrii ire-, Belinda, if report say true. 
Thy eyes first opened on a billet-dtmx.** 

Throughout this poem the satiric wit of Pope 



POPE 173 

peeps out In the pleasantest little smiling 
ways, as where, in describing the toilet-table, 
he says : — 

*' Here files of pins extend their shining rows, 
PufFs, powders, patches. Bibles, billet-doux.'''' 

Or when, after the fatal lock has been sev- 
ered, — 

*• Then flashed the living lightning from her eyes. 
And screams of horror rend the affrighted skies. 
Not louder shrieks to pitying Heaven are cast 
When husbands or when lapdogs breathe their last; 
Or when rich china-vessels, fallen from high. 
In glittering dust and painted fragments lie!" 

And SO, when the conflict begins : — 

•' Now Jove suspends his golden scales in air; 
Weighs the men's wits against the ladies' hair; 
The doubtful beam long nods from side to side; 
At length the wits mount up, the hairs subside." 

But more than the wit and fancy, I think, the 
perfect keeping of the poem deserves admiration. 
Except a touch of grossness, here and there, 
there is the most pleasing harmony in all the 
conceptions and images. The punishments 
which he assigns to the Sylphs who neglect 
their duty are charmingly appropriate and in- 
genious : — 

"Whatever spirit, careless of his charge. 
His post neglects, or leaves the fair at large. 
Shall feel sharp vengeance soon o'er take his sins; 
Be stopped in vials or transfixed with pins. 



174 POPE 

Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie. 
Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin's eye; 
Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain. 
While clogged he beats his silver wings in vain; 
Or alum styptics with contracting power, 
Shrink his thin essence like a rivelled flower; 
Or as Ixion fixed the wretch shall feel 
The giddy motion of the whirling wheel. 
In fumes of burning chocolate shall glow. 
And tremble at the sea that froths below! " 

The speech of Thalestris, too, with its droll 
climax, is equally good : — 

" Methinks already T your tears survey. 
Already hear the horrid things they say. 
Already see you a degraded toast. 
And all your honor in a whisper lost! 
How shall I then your helpless fame defend ? 
'T will then be infamy to seem your friend! 
And shall this prize, the inestimable prize. 
Exposed through crystal to the gazing eyes. 
And heightened by the diamond's circling rays. 
On that rapacious hand forever blaze ? 
Sooner shall grass in Hydepark Circus grow. 
And wits take lodging in the sound of Bow, 
Sooner let earth, air, sea, in chaos fall. 
Men, monkeys, lapdogs, parrots, perish all!" 

So also Belinda's account of the morning 
omens: — 

** 'T was this the morning omens seemed to tell; 
Thrice from my trembling hand the patch-box fell; 
The tottering china shook without a wind; 
Nay, Poll sat mute, and Shock was most unkind." 



POPE 175 

The idea of the goddess of Spleen, and of her 
palace, where 

" The dreaded East is all the wind that blows," — 

was a very happy one. In short, the whole poem 
more truly deserves the name of a creation than 
anything Pope ever wrote. The action is con- 
fined to a world of his own, the supernatural 
agency is wholly of his own contrivance, and 
nothing is allowed to overstep the limitations of 
the subject. It ranks by itself as one of the 
purest works of human fancy ; whether that 
fancy be strictly poetical or not is another mat- 
ter. If we compare it with the " Midsummer 
Night's Dream," an uncomfortable doubt is sug- 
gested. The perfection of form in the " Rape of 
the Lock " is to me conclusive evidence that in 
it the natural genius of Pope found fuller and 
freer expression than in any other of his poems. 
The others are aggregates of brilliant passages 
rather than harmonious wholes. 

It is a droll illustration of the inconsistencies 
of human nature, a more profound satire than 
Pope himself ever wrote, that his fame should 
chiefly rest upon the " Essay on Man." It has 
been praised and admired by men of the most 
opposite beliefs, and men of no belief at all. 
Bishops and free-thinkers have met here on a 
common ground of sympathetic approval. And, 
indeed, there is no particular faith in it. It is a 



176 .POPE 

droll medley of inconsistent opinions. It proves 
only two things beyond a question, — that Pope 
was not a great thinker ; and that wherever 
he found a thought, no matter what, he could 
express it so tersely, so clearly, and with such 
smoothness of versification as to give it an ever- 
lasting currency. Hobbes's unwieldy " Levia- 
than," left stranded there on the shore of the 
last age, and nauseous with the stench of its 
selfishness, — from this Pope distilled a fragrant 
oil with which to fill the brilliant lamps of his 
philosophy, — lamps like those in the tombs 
of alchemists, that go out the moment the 
healthy air is let in upon them. The only posi- 
tive doctrines in the poem are the selfishness of 
Hobbes set to music, and the Pantheism of 
Spinoza brought down from mysticism to com- 
monplace. Nothing can be more absurd than 
many of the dogmas taught in this "Essay on 
Man." For example, Pope affirms explicitly 
that instinct is something better than reason : — 

♦• See him from Nature rising slow to art. 
To copy instinct then was reason's part; 
Thus, then, to man the voice of Nature spake; — 
Go, from the creatures thy instructions take; 
Learn from the beasts what food the thickets yield; 
Learn from the birds the physic of the field; 
The arts of building from the bee receive; 
Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave; 
Learn of the little nautilus to sail. 
Spread the thin oar, or catch the driving gale." 



POPZ 177 

I say nothing of the quiet way in which the 
general term " Nature " is substituted for God, 
but how unutterably void of reasonableness is 
the theory that Nature would have left her high- 
est product, man, destitute of that instinct with 
which she had endowed her other creatures ! 
As if reason were not the most sublimated form 
of instinct. The accuracy on which Pope prided 
himself, and for which he is commended, was 
not accuracy of thought so much as of expres- 
sion. And he cannot always even claim this 
merit, but only that of correct rhyme, as in one 
of the passages I have already quoted from the 
" Rape of the Lock " he talks of casting shrieks 
to heaven, — a performance of some difficulty, 
except when cast is needed to rhyme with 
last. 

But the supposition is that in the " Essay on 
Man " Pope did not himself know what he was 
writing. He was only the condenser and epl- 
grammatizer of Bolingbroke, — a very fitting 
St. John for such a gospel. Or, if he did know, 
we can account for the contradictions by sup- 
posing that he threw in some of the common- 
place moralities to conceal his real drift. John- 
son asserts that Bolingbroke in private laughed 
at Pope's having been made the mouthpiece of 
opinions which he did not hold. But this is 
hardly probable when we consider the relations 
between them. It is giving Pope altogether too 



178 POPE 

little credit for intelligence to suppose that he 
did not understand the principles of his intimate 
friend. The caution with which he at first con- 
cealed the authorship would argue that he had 
doubts as to the reception of the poem. When 
it was attacked on the score of infidelity, he 
gladly accepted Warburton's championship, and 
assumed whatever pious interpretation he con- 
trived to thrust upon it. The beginning of the 
poem is familiar to everybody : — 

*• Awake, my St. John, leave all meaner things 
To low ambition and the pride of kings; 
Let us (since life can little more supply 
Than just to look about us and to die) 
Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man, 
A mighty maze, — but not without a plan." 

To expatiate o' er a mighty maze is rather loose 
writing, but the last verse, as it stood in the 
original editions, was, — 

" A mighty maze of walks without a plan " ; — 

and perhaps this came nearer Pope's real opin- 
ion than the verse he substituted for it. Warbur- 
ton is careful not to mention this variation in his 
notes. The poem is everywhere as remarkable 
for its confusion of logic as it often is for ease 
of verse and grace of expression. An instance 
of both occurs in a passage frequently quoted : — 

** Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate; 
All but the page prescribed, their present state; 



POPE 179 

From brutes what men, from men what spirits know. 

Or who would suffer being here below ? 

The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day. 

Had he thy reason, would he skip and play ? 

Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food. 

And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood. 

O, blindness to the future kindly given 

That each may fill the circle meant by heaven ! 

Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, 

A hero perish or a sparrow fall. 

Atoms or systems into ruin hurled. 

And now a bubble burst, and now a world ! " 

Now, if " heaven from all creatures hides the 
book of fate," why should not the lamb " skip 
and play," if he had the reason of man ? Why, 
because he would then be able to read the book 
of fate. But if man himself cannot, why, then, 
could the lamb with the reason of man ? For, 
if the lamb had the reason of man, the book of 
fate would still be hidden, so far as himself was 
concerned. If the inferences we can draw from 
appearances are equivalent to a knowledge of 
destiny, the knowing enough to take an um- 
brella in cloudy weather might be called so. 
There is a manifest confusion between what we 
know about ourselves and about other people ; 
the whole point of the passage being that we are 
always mercifully blinded to our own future, 
however much reason we may possess. There 
is also inaccuracy as well as inelegance in say- 
ing,— 



i8o POPE 

*< Heaven, 

Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, 
A hero perish or a sparrow fall." 

To the last verse Warburton, desirous of recon- 
ciling his author with Scripture, appends a note 
referring to Matthew x. 29 : " Are not two spar- 
rows sold for one farthing ? and one of them 
shall not fall to the ground without your Father." 
It would not have been safe to have referred to 
the thirty-first verse : " Fear ye not, therefore, 
ye are of more value than many sparrows." 

To my feeling, one of the most beautiful 
passages in the whole poem is that familiar 
one : — 

*♦ Lo, the poor Indian whose untutored mind 
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind. 
His soul proud science never taught to stray 
Far as the solar walk or milky way: 
Yet simple Nature to his hope has given 
Behind the cloud-topt hill a humbler heaven; 
Some safer world in depth of woods embraced. 
Some happier island in the watery waste. 
Where slaves once more their native land behold. 
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold. 
To be contents his natural desire, 
He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire. 
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky. 
His faithful dog shall bear him company." 

But this comes in as a corollary to what went 
just before : — 



POPE 18 1 

** Hope springs eternal in the human breast, 
Man never is but always to be blest; 
The soul, uneasy, and confined from home. 
Rests and expatiates in a life to come. ' ' 

Then follows immediately the passage about the 
poor Indian, who, after all, it seems, is con- 
tented with merely beings and whose soul, there- 
fore, is an exception to the general rule. And 
what have the " solar walk " (as he calls it) and 
" milky way " to do with the affair ? Does our 
hope of heaven depend on our knowledge of 
astronomy ? Or does he mean that science and 
faith are necessarily hostile ? And, after being 
told that it is the " untutored mind " of the 
savage which " sees God in clouds and hears 
him in the wind," we are rather surprised to 
find that the lesson the poet intends to teach is 
that 

" All are but parts of one stupendous whole. 
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul. 
That, changed through all, and yet in all the same. 
Great in the earth, as in the ethereal frame. 
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze. 
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees." 

So that we are no better off than the untutored 
Indian, after the poet has tutored us. Dr. War- 
burton makes a rather lame attempt to ward off 
the charge of Spinozism from this last passage. 
He would have found it harder to show that 
the acknowledgment of any divine revelation 



i82 POPE 

would not overturn the greater part of its teach- 
ings. If Pope intended by his poem all that the 
bishop takes for granted in his commentary, we 
must deny him what is usually claimed as his 
first merit, — clearness. If he did not^ we grant 
him clearness as a writer at the expense of sin- 
cerity as a man. Perhaps a more charitable 
solution of the difficulty would be, that Pope's 
precision of thought was no match for the fluency 
of his verse. 

Lord Byron goes so far as to say, in speak- 
ing of Pope, that he who executes the best, no 
matter what his department, will rank the high- 
est. I think there are enough indications in 
these letters of Byron's, however, that they 
were written rather more against Wordsworth 
than for Pope. The rule he lays down would 
make Voltaire a greater poet, in some respects, 
than Shakespeare. Byron cites Petrarch as an 
example ; yet if Petrarch had put nothing more 
into his sonnets than execution^ there are plenty 
of Italian sonneteers who would be his match. 
But, in point of fact, the department chooses 
the man and not the man the department, and 
it has a great deal to do with our estimate of 
him. Is the department of Milton no higher 
than that of Butler ? Byron took especial care 
not to write in the style he commended. But I 
think Pope has received quite as much credit 
in respect even of execution as he deserves. 



POPE 183 

Surely execution is not confined to versification 
alone. What can be worse than this ? 

" At length Erasmus, that great, injured name 
(The glory of the priesthood and the shame). 
Stemmed the wild torrent of a barbarous age. 
And drove those holy vandals off the stage." 

It would have been hard for Pope to have found 
a prettier piece of confusion in any of the small 
authors he laughed at than this image of a great, 
injured name stemming a torrent and driving 
vandals off the stage. And in the following 
verses the image is helplessly confused : — 

'♦Kind self-conceit to some her glass applies. 
Which no one looks in with another's eyes. 
But, as the flatterer or dependant paint. 
Beholds himself a patriot, chief, or saint." 

The use of the word " applies " is perfectly 
un-English; and it seems that people who look 
in this remarkable glass see their pictures and 
not their reflections. Often, also, when Pope 
attempts the sublime, his epithets become curi- 
ously unpoetical, as where he says, in the 
" Dunciad," — 

" As, one by one, at dread Medea's strain. 
The sickening stars fade off the ethereal plain J** 

And not seldom he is satisfied with the music 
of the verse without much regard to fitness of 
imagery ; in the " Essay on Man," for ex- 
ample : — 



i84 POPE 

"Passions, like elements, though born to fight. 
Yet, mixed and softened, in his work unite; 
These 't is enough to temper and employ; 
But what composes man can man destroy ? 
Suffice that Reason keep to Nature's road. 
Subject, compound them, follow her and God. 
Love, Hope, and Joy, fair Pleasure's smiling train. 
Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of Pain, 
These, mixed with Art, and to due bounds confined 
Make and maintain the balance of the mind." 

Here Reason is represented as an apothecary 
compounding pills of "Pleasure's smiling train" 
and the " family of Pain." And in the " Moral 
Essays," — 

*' Know God and Nature only are the same; 
In man the judgment shoots at flying game, 
A bird of passage, gone as soon as found. 
Now in the moon, perhaps, now under ground." 

The "judgment shooting at flying game " is 
an odd image enough; but I think a bird of pass- 
age, now in the moon and now under ground, 
could be found nowhere — out of Goldsmith's 
" Natural History," perhaps. An epigrammatic 
expression will also tempt him into saying 
something without basis in truth, as where he 
ranks tosrether " Macedonia's madman and the 
Swede," and says that neither of them "looked 
forward farther than his nose," a slang phrase 
which may apply well enough to Charles XII., 
but certainly not to the pupil of Aristotle, who 
showed himself capable of a large political fore- 



POPE 185 

thought. So, too, the rhyme, if correct, Is a suf- 
ficient apology for want of propriety in phrase, 
as where he makes " Socrates bleed." 

But it is in his "Moral Essays" and parts of 
his " Satires " that Pope deserves the praise 
which he himself desired : — 

" Happily to steer 
From grave to gay, from lively to severe. 
Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease. 
Intent to reason, or polite to please." 

Here Pope must be allowed to have established 
a style of his own, in which he is without a 
rival. One can open upon wit and epigram at 
any page. 

" Behold, if Fortune or a mistress frowns. 
Some plunge in business, other shave their crowns; 
To ease the soul of one oppressive weight. 
This quits an empire, that embroils a state; 
The same adust complexion has impelled, 
Charles to the convent, Philip to the field." 

Indeed, I think one gets a little tired of the 
invariable this set off by the inevitable that, 
and wishes antithesis would let him have a little 
quiet now and then. In the first couplet, too, 
the conditional " frown " would have been more 
elegant. But taken as detached passages, how 
admirably the different characters are drawn, so 
admirably that half the verses have become 
proverbial. This of Addison will bear reading 
again : — 



i86 POPE 

** Peace to all such; but were there one whose fires 
True genius kindles and fair fame inspires; 
Blest with each talent and each art to please. 
And born to write, converse, and live with ease;' 
Should such a man, too fond to rule alone. 
Bear like the Turk no brother near the throne. 
View him with scornful yet with jealous eyes. 
And hate for arts that caused himself to rise. 
Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer. 
And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer; 
WilHng to wound and yet afraid to strike. 
Just hint a fault and hesitate dislike, 
Alike reserved to blame or to commend, 
A timorous foe and a suspicious friend; 
Dreading e'en fools, by flatterers besieged. 
And io obliging that he ne'er obliged; 
Like Cato give his little Senate laws. 
And sit attentive to his own applause. 
While wits and templars every sentence raise. 
And wonder with a foolish face of praise; — 
Who but must laugh if such a man there be ? 
Who would not weep if Atticus were he ? " 

With the exception of the somewhat technical 
image in the second verse of Fame blowing the 
fire of genius, which too much puts us in mind 
of the frontispieces of the day, surely nothing 
better of its kind was ever written. How ap- 
plicable it was to Addison I shall consider in 
another place. As an accurate intellectual ob- 
server and describer of personal weaknesses, 
Pope stands by himself in English verse. 

In his epistle on the characters of women, no 
one who has ever known a noble woman, nay. 



POPE 187 

I should almost say no one who ever had a 
mother or sister, will find much to please him. 
The climax of his praise rather degrades than 
elevates. 

'* O, blest in temper, whose unclouded ray 
Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day. 
She who can love a sister's charms, or hear 
Sighs for a daughter with unwounded ear. 
She who ne'er answers till a husband cools. 
Or, if she rules him, never shows she rules. 
Charms by accepting, by submitting sways. 
Yet has her humor most when she obeys; 
Lets fops or fortune fly which way they will. 
Disdains all loss of tickets or codille. 
Spleen, vapors, or small-pox, above them all 
And mistress of herself, though china fall." 

The last line is very witty and pointed, — but 
consider what an ideal of womanly nobleness he 
must have had, who praises his heroine for not 
being jealous of her daughter. Addison, in com- 
mending Pope's " Essay on Criticism," says, 
speaking of us "who live in the latter ages of 
the world " : " We have little else to do left us 
but to represent the common sense of mankind, 
in more strong, more beautiful, or more un- 
common lights." I think he has here touched 
exactly the point of Pope's merit, and, in doing 
so, tacitly excludes him from the position of 
poet, in the highest sense. Take two of Jeremy 
Taylor's prose sentences about the Countess of 
Carbery, the lady in Milton's "Comus": "The 



188 POFE 

religion of this excellent lady was of another 
constitution : it took root downward in hu- 
mility, and brought forth fruit upward in the 
substantial graces of a Christian, in charity and 
justice, in chastity and modesty, in fair friend- 
ships and sweetness of society. . . . And though 
she had the greatest judgment, and the greatest 
experience of things and persons I ever yet 
knew in a person of her youth and sex and cir- 
cumstances, yet, as if she knew nothing of it, 
she had the meanest opinion of herself, and like 
a fair taper, when she shined to all the room, 
yet round about her station she had cast a shadow 
and a cloud, and she shined to everybody but 
herself." This is poetry, though not in verse. 
The plays of the elder dramatists are not with- 
out examples of weak and vile women, but they 
are not without noble ones either. Take these 
verses of Chapman, for example : — 

** Let no man value at a little price 
A virtuous woman's counsel: her winged spirit 
Is feathered oftentimes with noble words 
And, like her beauty, ravishing and pure; 
The weaker body, still the stronger soul. 
O, what a treasure is a virtuous wife. 
Discreet and loving. Not one gift on earth 
Makes a man's life so nighly bound to heaven. 
She gives him double forces to endure 
And to enjoy, being one with him. 
Feeling his joys and griefs with equal sense: 
If he fetch sighs, she draws her breath as short; 



POPE 189 

If he lament, she melts herself in tears; 

If he be glad, she triumphs; if he stir. 

She moves his way, in all things his sweet ape. 

Himself divinely varied without change. 

All store without her leaves a man but poor. 

And with her poverty is exceeding store." 

Pope in the characters I have read was drawing 
his ideal woman, for he says at the end that she 
shall be his muse. The sentiments are those of 
a bourgeois a.nd of the back parlor, more than of 
the poet and the muse's bower. A man's mind 
is known by the company it keeps. 

Now it is very possible that the women of 
Pope's time were as bad as they could be; but 
if God made poets for anything, it was to keep 
alive the traditions of the pure, the holy, and 
the beautiful. 1 grant the influence of the age, 
but there is a sense in which the poet is of no 
age, and Beauty, driven from every other home, 
will never be an outcast and a wanderer, while 
there is a poet's nature left, will never fail of the 
tribute at least of a song. It seems to me that 
Pope had a sense of the neat rather than of the 
beautiful. His nature delighted more in detect- 
ing the blemish than in enjoying the charm. 

However great his merit in expression, I 
think it impossible that a true poet could have 
written such a satire as the " Dunclad," which is 
even nastier than it is witty. It is filthy even In 
a filthy age, and Swift himself could not have 



I90 POPE 

gone beyond some parts of it. One's mind needs 
to be sprinkled with some disinfecting fluid after 
reading it. I do not remember that any other 
poet ever made poverty a crime. And it is 
wholly without discrimination. De Foe is set 
in the pillory forever ; and George Wither, the 
author of that charming poem, " Fair Virtue," 
classed among the dunces. And was it not in 
this age that loose Dick Steele paid his wife the 
finest compliment ever paid to woman, when he 
said "that to love her was a liberal education".'' 
Even in the " Rape of the Lock," the fancy is 
that of a wit rather than of a poet. It might 
not be just to compare his Sylphs with the Fair- 
ies of Shakespeare ; but contrast the kind of 
fancy shown in the poem with that of Drayton's 
" Nymphidia," for example. I will give one 
stanza of it, describing the palace of the Fairy : 

"The walls of spiders' legs were made. 
Well mortised, and finely laid 
(He was the master of his trade 
It curiously that builded): 
The windows of the eyes of cats. 
And, for the roof, instead of slats 
'T is covered with the skins of bats. 
With moonshine that are gilded." 

In the last line the eye and fancy of a poet are 
recognized. 

Personally we know more about Pope than 
about any of our poets. He kept no secrets 



POPE 191 

about himself. If he did not let the cat out cf the 
bag, he always contrived to give her tail a wrench 
so that we might know she was there. In spite 
of the savageness of his satires, his natural dis- 
position seems to have been an amiable one, 
and his character as an author was as purely 
factitious as his style. Dr. Johnson appears to 
have suspected his sincerity ; but artifice more 
than insincerity lay at the basis of his character. 
I think that there was very little real malice in 
him, and that his " evil was wrought from want 
of thought." When Dennis was old and poor, 
he wrote a prologue for a play to be acted for his 
benefit. Except Addison, he numbered among 
his friends the most illustrious men of his time. 
The correspondence of Pope is, on the whole, 
less interesting than that of any other eminent 
English poet, except that of Southey, and their 
letters have the same fault of being labored com- 
positions. Southey's are, on the whole, the more 
agreeable of the two, for they inspire one (as 
Pope's certainly do not) with a sincere respect 
for the character of the writer. Pope's are alto- 
gether too full of the proclamation of his own 
virtues to be pleasant reading. It is plain th^t 
they were mostly addressed to the public, per- 
haps even to posterity. But letters, however 
carefully drilled to be circumspect, are sure to 
blab, and those of Pope leave in the reader's 
mind an unpleasant feeling of circumspection,— 



192 POPE 

of an attempt to look as an eminent literary 
character should rather than as the man really 
was. They have the unnatural constraint of a 
man in full dress sitting for his portrait and en- 
deavoring to look his best. We never catch 
him, if he can help it, at unawares. Among all 
Pope's correspondents, Swift shows in the most 
dignified and, one is tempted to say, the most 
amiable light. It is creditable to the Dean that 
the letters which Pope addressed to him are by 
far the most simple and straightforward of any 
that he wrote. No sham could encounter those 
terrible eyes in Dublin without wincing. I think, 
on the whole, that a revision of judgment would 
substitute " discomforting consciousness of the 
public " for " insincerity " in judging Pope's 
character by his letters. He could not shake 
off the habits of the author, and never, or almost 
never, in prose, acquired that knack of seeming 
carelessness that makes Walpole's elaborate com- 
positions such agreeable reading. Pope would 
seem to have kept a commonplace book of 
phrases proper to this or that occasion ; and he 
transfers a compliment, a fine moral sentiment, 
nay, even sometimes a burst of passionate ardor, 
from one correspondent to another, with the 
most cold-blooded impartiality. Were it not 
for this curious economy of his, no one could 
read his letters to Lady Wortley Montagu with- 
out a conviction that they were written by a lover. 



POPE 193 

Indeed, I think nothing short of the spretae 
injuria formae will account for (though it will 
not excuse) the savage vindictiveness he felt and 
showed towards her. It may be suspected also 
that the bitterness of caste added gall to his 
resentment. His enemy wore that impenetrable 
armor of superior rank which rendered her in- 
difference to his shafts the more provoking that 
it was unaffected. Even for us his satire loses 
its sting when we reflect that it is not in human 
nature for a woman to have had two such ut- 
terly irreconcilable characters as those of Lady 
Mary before and after her quarrel with the poet. 
In any view of Pope's conduct in this affair, 
there is an ill savor in his attempting to degrade 
a woman whom he had once made sacred with 
his love. Spenser touches the right chord when 
he says of the Rosalinde who had rejected him, 

** Not, then, to her, that scorned thing so base. 
But to myself the blame, that lookt so high; 
Yet so much grace let her vouchsafe to grant 
To simple swain, sith her I may not love. 
Yet that I may her honor paravant 
And praise her worth, though far my wit above; 
Such grace shall be some guerdon of the grief 
And long affliction which I have endured." 

In his correspondence with Aaron Hill, Pope, 
pushed to the wall, appears positively mean. 
He vainly endeavors to show that his person- 
alities had all been written in the interests of 



194 POPE 

literature and morality, and from no selfish mo- 
tive. But it is hard to believe that Theobald 
would have been deemed worthy of his disgust- 
ful preeminence but for the manifest superiority 
of his edition of Shakespeare, or that Addison 
would have been so adroitly disfigured unless 
through wounded self-love. It is easy to con- 
ceive the resentful shame which Pope must have 
felt when Addison so almost contemptuously 
disavowed all complicity in his volunteer de- 
fence of " Cato " in a brutal assault on Dennis. 
Pope had done a mean thing to propitiate a man 
whose critical judgment he dreaded; and the 
great man, instead of thanking him, had resented 
his interference as impertinent. In the whole 
portrait of Atticus one cannot help feeling that 
Pope's satire is not founded on knowledge, 
but rather on what his own sensitive suspicion 
divined of the opinions of one whose expressed 
preferences in poetry implied a condemnation 
of the very grounds of the satirist's own popu- 
larity. We shall not so easily give up the purest 
and most dignified figure of that somewhat vul- 
gar generation, who ranks with Sidney and Spen- 
ser as one of the few perfect gentlemen in our 
literary annals. A man who could command the 
unswerving loyalty of honest and impulsive Dick 
Steele could not have been a coward or a back- 
biter. The only justification alleged by Pope 
was of the flimsiest kind, namely, that Addison 



POPE 195 

regretted the introduction of the Sylphs in the 
second edition of the "Rape of the Lock," say- 
ing that the poem was merum sal before. Let any 
one ask himself how he likes an author's emen- 
dations of any poem to which his ear had adapted 
itself in its former shape, and he will hardly 
think it needful to charge Addison with any mean 
motive for his conservatism in this matter. One 
or two of Pope's letters are so good as to make 
us regret that he did not oftener don the dress- 
ing-gown and slippers in his correspondence. 
One in particular, to Lord Burlington, describ- 
ing a journey on horseback to Oxford with Lin- 
tot the bookseller, is full of a lightsome humor 
worthy of Cowper, almost worthy of Gray. 

Joseph Warton, in summing up at the end of 
his essay on the genius and writings of Pope, 
says that the largest part of his works *' is of 
the didactic^ morale and satiric; and, conse- 
quently, not of the most poetic species o( poetry ; 
whence it is manifest that good sense and judg- 
ment were his characteristical excellences rather 
t]\?ir\ fancy and invention.'' It is plain that in 
any strict definition there can be only one kind 
of poetry, and that what Warton really meant 
to say was that Pope was not a poet at all. This, 
I think, is shown by what Johnson says in his 
" Life of Pope," though he does not name War- 
ton. The dispute on this point went on with 
occasional lulls for more than a half century after 



196 POPE 

Warton's death. It was renewed with peculiar 
acrimony when the Rev. W. L. Bowles diffused 
and confused Warton's critical opinions in his 
own peculiarly helpless way in editing a new 
edition of Pope in 1806. Bowles entirely mis- 
took the functions of an editor, and maladroitly 
entangled his judgment of the poetry with his 
estimate of the author's character.' Thirteen 
years later, Campbell, in his " Specimens," con- 
troverted Mr. Bowles's estimate of Pope's char- 
acter and position, both as man and poet. Mr. 
Bowles replied in a letter to Campbell on what 
he called "the invariable principles of poetry." 
This letter was in turn somewhat sharply criti- 
cised by Gilchrist in the " Quarterly Review." 
Mr. Bowles made an angry and unmannerly re- 
tort, among other things charging Gilchrist with 
the crime of being a tradesman's son, whereupon 
the affair became what they call on the frontier 
a free fight, in which Gilchrist, Roscoe, the elder 
Disraeli, and Byron took part with equal relish, 
though with various fortune. The last shot, in 
what had grown into a thirty years' war, between 

' Bowles's Sonnets, well-nigh forgotten now, did more than 
his controversial writings for the cause he advocated. Their 
influence upon the coming generation was great (greater than 
we can well account for) and beneficial. Coleridge tells us 
that he made forty copies of them while at Christ's Hospital. 
Wordsworth's prefaces first made imagination the true test of 
poetry, in its more modern sense. But they drew little notice 
till later. 



POPE 197 

the partisans of what was called the Old School 
of poetry and those of the New, was fired by 
Bowles in 1826. Bowles, in losing his temper, 
lost also what little logic he had, and though, 
in a vague way, assthetically right, contrived 
always to be argumentatively wrong. Anger 
made worse confusion in a brain never very clear, 
and he had neither the scholarship nor the crit- 
ical faculty for a vigorous exposition of his own 
thesis. Never was wilder hitting than his, and 
he laid himself open to dreadful punishment, es- 
pecially from Byron, whose two letters are mas- 
terpieces of polemic prose. Bowles most happily 
exemplified in his own pamphlets what was really 
the turning-point of the whole controversy 
(though all the combatants more or less lost 
sight of it or never saw it), namely, that without 
clearness and terseness there could be no good 
writing, whether in prose or verse ; in other 
words that, while precision of phrase presup- 
poses lucidity of thought, yet good writing is an 
art as well as a gift. Byron alone saw clearly that 
here was the true knot of the question, though, 
as his object was mainly mischief, he was not 
careful to loosen It. The sincerity of Byron's 
admiration of Pope has been, it seems to me, 
too hastily doubted. What he admired in him 
was that patience in careful finish which he felt 
to be wanting in himself and in most of his con- 
temporaries. Pope's assailants went so far as to 



198 POPE 

make a defect of what, rightly considered, was 
a distinguished merit, though the amount of it 
was exaggerated. The weak point in the case 
was that his nicety concerned itself wholly about 
the phrase, leaving the thought to be as faulty 
as it would, and that it seldom extended beyond 
the couplet, often not beyond a single verse. 
His serious poetry, therefore, at its best, is a 
succession of loosely strung epigrams, and no 
poet more often than he makes the second line 
of the couplet a mere train-bearer to the first. 
His more ambitious works may be defined as 
careless thinking carefully versified. Lessing 
was one of the first to see this, and accordingly 
he tells us that " his great, I will not say greatest, 
merit lay in what we call the mechanic of 
poetry." ' Lessing, with his usual insight, par- 
enthetically qualifies his statement; for where 
Pope, as in the " Rape of the Lock," found a 
subject exactly level with his genius, he was 
able to make what, taken for all in all, is the 
most perfect poem in the language. 

It will hardly be questioned that the man 
who writes what is still piquant and remember- 
able, a century and a quarter after his death, 
was a man of genius. But there are two modes 
of uttering such things as cleave to the memory 

■" Brief e die neueste Litter atur betreffend, 1759, "• Brief, 
See also his more elaborate criticism of the Essay o?i Man 
{^Pope ein Metaphysiker'), 1755. 



POPE 199 

of mankind. They may be said or sung. I do 
not think that Pope's verse anywhere sings, but 
it should seem that the abiding presence of 
fancy in his best work forbids his exclusion from 
the rank of poet. The atmosphere in which he 
habitually dwelt was an essentially prosaic one, 
the language habitual to him was that of con- 
versation and society, so that he lacked the help 
of that fresher dialect which seems like inspira- 
tion in the elder poets. His range of associa- 
tions was of that narrow kind which is always 
vulgar, whether it be found in the village or the 
court. Certainly he has not the force and 
majesty of Dryden in his better moods, but he 
has a grace, a finesse, an art of being pungent, 
a sensitiveness to impressions, that would incline 
us to rank him with Voltaire (whom in many 
ways he so much resembles), as an author with 
whom the gift of writing was primary, and that 
of verse secondary. No other poet that I re- 
member ever wrote prose which is so purely 
prose as his ; and yet, in any impartial criticism, 
the " Rape of the Lock " sets him even as a poet 
far above many men more largely endowed with 
poetic feeling and insight than he. 

A great deal must be allowed to Pope for the 
age in which he lived, and not a little, I think, 
for the influence of Swift. In his own province 
he still stands unapproachably alone. If to be 
the greatest satirist of individual men, rather 



200 POPE 

than of human nature, if to be the highest ex- 
pression which the life of the court and the ball- 
room has ever found in verse, if to have added 
more phrases to our language than any other 
but Shakespeare, if to have charmed four gen- 
erations, make a man a great poet, — then he is 
one. He was the chief founder of an artificial 
style of writing, which in his hands was living 
and powerful, because he used it to express arti- 
ficial modes of thinking and an artificial state 
of society. Measured by any high standard of 
imagination, he will be found wanting ; tried by 
any test of wit, he is unrivalled. 



WORDSWORTH 

1875 

A GENERATION has now passed away 
since Wordsworth was laid with the family 
in the churchyard at Grasmere.' Perhaps 
it is hardly yet time to take a perfectly impar- 
tial measure of his value as a poet. To do this 
is especially hard for those who are old enough 
to remember the last shot which the foe was 
sullenly firing in that long war of critics which 
began when he published his manifesto as Pre- 
tender, and which came to a pause rather than 
to an end when they flung up their caps with 
the rest at his final coronation. Something of the 
intensity of the odium theologicum (if indeed 
the aestheticum be not in these days the more 
bitter of the two) entered into the conflict. The 
Wordsworthians were a sect, who, if they had 
the enthusiasm, had also not a little of the 

' ** I pay many little visits to the family in the churchyard 
at Grasmere," writes James Dixon (an old servant of Words- 
worth) to Crabb Robinson, with a simple, one might almost 
say canine pathos, thirteen years after his wife's death. Words- 
worth was always considerate and kind with his servants, 
Robinson tells us. 



202 WORDSWORTH 

exclusiveness and partiality to which sects are 
liable. The verses of the master had for them 
the virtue of religious canticles stimulant of 
zeal and not amenable to the ordinary tests of 
cold-blooded criticism. Like the hymns of the 
Huguenots and Covenanters, they were songs of 
battle no less than of worship, and the combined 
ardors of conviction and conflict lent them a fire 
that was not naturally their own. As we read 
them now, that virtue of the moment is gone out 
of them, and whatever of Dr. Wattsiness there is 
gives us a slight shock of disenchantment. It 
is something like the difference between the 
" Marseillaise " sung by armed propagandists 
on the edge of battle, or by Brissotins in the 
tumbrel, and the words of it read coolly in 
the closet, or recited with the factitious frenzy 
of Therese. It was natural in the early days of 
Wordsworth's career to dwell most fondly on 
those profounder qualities to appreciate which 
settled in some sort the measure of a man's right 
to judge of poetry at all. But now we must admit 
the shortcomings, the failures, the defects as no 
less essential elements in forming a sound judg- 
ment as to whether the seer and artist were so 
united in him as to justify the claim first put in by 
himself and afterwards maintained by his sect to 
a place beside the few great poets who exalt men's 
minds, and give a right direction and safe out- 
let to their passions through the imagination. 



WORDSWORTH 203 

while insensibly helping them toward balance 
of character and serenity of judgment by stimu- 
lating their sense of proportion, form, and the 
nice adjustment of means to ends. In none of 
our poets has the constant propulsion of an un- 
bending will, and the concentration of exclusive, 
if I must not say somewhat narrow, sympathies 
done so much to make the original endow- 
ment of Nature effective, and in none accord- 
ingly does the biography throw so much light 
on the works, or enter so largely into their com- 
position as an element whether of power or of 
weakness. Wordsworth never saw, and I think 
never wished to see, beyond the limits of his 
own consciousness and experience. He early 
conceived himself to be, and through life was 
confirmed by circumstances in the faith that he 
was, a " dedicated spirit," ' a state of mind likely 
to further an intense but at the same time one- 
sided development of the intellectual powers. 
The solitude in which the greater part of his 
mature life was passed, while it doubtless min- 
istered to the passionate intensity of his musings 
upon man and Nature, was, it may be suspected, 

' In the Prelude he attributes this consecration to a sunrise 
seen (during a college vacation) as he walked homeward from 
some village festival where he had danced all night : — 

• ' My heart was full ; I made no vows, but vows 
Were then made for me ; bond unknown to me 
Was given that I should be, else sinning greatly, 
A dedicated Spirit." (Bk. iv.) 



204 WORDSWORTH 

harmful to him as an artist, by depriving him 
of any standard of proportion outside himself 
by which to test the comparative value of his 
thoughts, and by rendering him more and more 
incapable of that urbanity of mind which could 
be gained only by commerce with men more 
nearly on his own level, and which gives tone 
without lessening individuality. Wordsworth 
never quite saw the distinction between the 
eccentric and the original. For what we call 
originality seems not so much anything pecu- 
liar, much less anything odd, but that quality 
in a man which touches human nature at most 
points of its circumference, which reinvigorates 
the consciousness of our own powers by recall- 
ing and confirming our own unvalued sensations 
and perceptions, gives classic shape to our own 
amorphous imaginings, and adequate utterance 
to our own stammering conceptions or emotions. 
The poet's office is to be a Voice, not of one 
crying in the wilderness to a knot of already 
magnetized acolytes, but singing amid the 
throng of men, and lifting their common aspi- 
rations and sympathies (so first clearly revealed 
to themselves) on the wings of his song to a 
purer ether and a wider reach of view. We 
cannot, if we would, read the poetry of Words- 
worth as mere poetry ; at every other page we 
find ourselves entangled in a problem of aesthet- 
ics. The world-old question of matter and form. 



WORDSWORTH 205 

of whether nectar is of precisely the same flavor 
when served to us from a Grecian chalice or 
from any jug of ruder pottery, comes up for 
decision anew. The Teutonic nature has al- 
ways shown a sturdy preference of the solid 
bone with a marrow of nutritious moral to any 
shadow of the same on the flowing mirror of 
sense. Wordsworth never lets us long forget 
the deeply rooted stock from which he sprang, 
— vien ben da lui. 



The true rank of Wordsworth among poets 
is, perhaps, not even yet to be fairly estimated, 
so hard is it to escape into the quiet hall of 
judgment uninflamed by the tumult of parti- 
sanship which besets the doors. 

Coming to manhood, predetermined to be a 
great poet, at a time when the artificial school 
of poetry was enthroned with all the authority 
of long succession and undisputed legitimacy, 
it was almost inevitable that Wordsworth, who, 
both by nature and judgment, was a rebel against 
the existing order, should become a partisan. 
Unfortunately, he became not only the partisan 
of a system, but of William Wordsworth as its 
representative. Right in general principle, he 
thus necessarily became wrong in particulars. 



2o6 WORDSWORTH 

Justly convinced that greatness only achieves 
its ends by implicitly obeying its own instincts, 
he perhaps reduced the following his instincts 
too much to a system, mistook his own resent- 
ments for the promptings of his natural genius, 
and, compelling principle to the measure of his 
own temperament or even of the controversial 
exigency of the moment, fell sometimes into the 
error of making naturalness itself artificial. If 
a poet resolve to be original, it will end com- 
monly in his being merely peculiar. 

Wordsworth himself departed more and more 
in practice, as he grew older, from the theories 
\yhich he had laid down in his prefaces ; but 
those theories undoubtedly had a great effect in 
retarding the growth of his fame. He had care- 
fully constructed a pair of spectacles through 
which his earlier poems were to be studied, and 
the public insisted on looking through them at 
his mature works, and were consequently unable 
to see fairly what required a different focus. He 
forced his readers to come to his poetry with a 
certain amount of conscious preparation, and 
thus gave them beforehand the impression of 
something like mechanical artifice, and deprived 
them of the contented repose of implicit faith. 
To the child a watch seems to be a living crea- 
ture ; but Wordsworth would not let his read- 
ers be children, and did injustice to himself by 
giving them an uneasy doubt whether creations 



WORDSWORTH 207 

which really throbbed with the very heart's- 
blood of genius, and were alive with Nature's 
life of life, were not contrivances of wheels and 
springs. A naturalness which we are told to ex- 
pect has lost the crowning grace of Nature. The 
men who walked in Cornelius Agrippa's vision- 
ary gardens had probably no more pleasurable 
emotion than that of a shallow wonder, or an 
equally shallow self-satisfaction in thinking they 
had hit upon the secret of the thaumaturgy ; but 
to a tree that has grown as God willed we come 
without a theory and with no botanical predilec- 
tions, enjoying it simply and thankfully; or the 
Imagination re-creates for us its past summers 
and winters, the birds that have nested and sung 
in it, the sheep that have clustered in its shade, 
the winds that have visited it, the cloudbergs 
that have drifted over it, and the snows that 
have ermined it in winter. The Imagination 
is a faculty that flouts at foreordination, and 
Wordsworth seemed to do all he could to cheat 
his readers of her company by laying out paths 
with a peremptory Do not step off the gravel ! at 
the opening of each, and preparing pitfalls for 
every conceivable emotion, with guide-boards to 
tell each when and where it must be caught. 

But if these things stood in the way of im- 
mediate appreciation, he had another theory 
which interferes more seriously with the total 
and permanent effect of his poems. He was 



2o8 WORDSWORTH 

theoretically determined not only to be a philo- 
sophic poet, but to be a great philosophic poet, 
and to this end he must produce an epic. Leav- 
ing aside the question whether the epic be 
obsolete or not, it may be doubted whether 
the history of a single man's mind is universal 
enough in its interest to furnish all the require- 
ments of the epic machinery, and it may be more 
than doubted whether a poet's philosophy be 
ordinary metaphysics, divisible into chapter and 
section. It is rather something which is more 
energetic in a word than in a whole treatise, and 
our hearts unclose themselves instinctively at its 
simple Open sesame ! while they would stand 
firm against the reading of the whole body of 
philosophy. In point of fact, the one element 
of greatness which " The Excursion " possesses 
indisputably is heaviness. It is only the epi- 
sodes that are universally read, and the effect 
of these is diluted by the connecting and accom- 
panying lectures on metaphysics. Wordsworth 
had his epic mould to fill, and, like Benvenuto 
Cellini in casting his Perseus, was forced to 
throw in everything, debasing the metal lest it 
should run short. Separated from the rest, the 
episodes are perfect poems in their kind, and 
without example in the language. 

Wordsworth, like most solitary men of strong 
minds, was a good critic of the substance of 
poetry, but somewhat niggardly in the allow- 



WORDSWORTH 209 

ance he made for those subsidiary qualities 
which make it the charmer of leisure and the 
employment of minds without definite object. 
It may be doubted, indeed, whether he set much 
store by any contemporary writing but his own, 
and whether he did not look upon poetry too 
exclusively as an exercise rather of the intellect 
than as a nepenthe of the imagination.' He 
says of himself, speaking of his youth : — 

** In fine, 
I was a better judge of thoughts than words. 
Misled in estimating words, not only 
By common inexperience of youth. 
But by the trade in classic niceties. 
The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase 
From languages that want the living voice 
To carry meaning to the natural heart; 
To tell us what is passion, what is truth. 
What reason, what simplicity and sense." * 

Though he here speaks in the preterite tense, 
this was always true of him, and his thought 
seems often to lean upon a word too weak to 
bear its weight. No reader of adequate insight 
can help regretting that he did not earlier give 
himself to " the trade of classic niceties." It was 
precisely this which gives to the blank verse of 
Landor the severe dignity and reserved force 
which alone among later poets recall the tune 

' According to Landor, he pronounced all Scott's poetry to 
be "not worth five shillings." 
* Prelude, bk. iv. 



2IO WORDSWORTH 

of Milton, and to which Wordsworth never 
attained. Indeed, Wordsworth's blank verse 
(though the passion be profounder) is always 
essentially that of Cowper. They were alike 
also in their love of outward nature and of simple 
•things. The main difference between them is 
one of scenery rather than of sentiment, between 
the lifelong familiar of the mountains and the 
dweller on the plain. 

It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the 
very highest powers of the poetic mind were 
associated with a certain tendency to the diffuse 
and commonplace. It Is in the understanding 
(always prosaic) that the great golden veins of 
his imagination are embedded.' He wrote too \ 
much to write always well ; for it is not a great j 
Xerxes army of words, but a compact Greek 
ten thousand, that march safely down to poster- 
ity. He set tasks to his divine faculty, which is 
much the same as trying to make Jove's eagle 
do the service of a clucking hen. Throughout 
" The Prelude " and " The Excursion " he seems 

^ This was instinctively felt, even by his admirers. Miss 
Martineau said to Crabb Robinson in 1839, speaking of 
Wordsworth's conversation: ** Sometimes he is annoying from 
the pertinacity with which he dwells on trifles; at other times 
he flows on in the utmost grandeur, leaving a strong impression 
of inspiration." Robinson tells us that he read Resolution and 
Independence to a lady who was affected by it even to tears 
and then said, " I have not heard anything for years that so 
much delighted me; but, after all, it is not poetry.'* 



J 



WORDSWORTH 211 

striving to bind the wizard Imagination with the 
sand-ropes of dry disquisition, and to have for- 
gotten the potent spell-word which would make 
the particles cohere. There is an arenaceous 
quality in the style which makes progress weari- 
some. Yet with what splendors as of mountain 
sunsets are we rewarded ! what golden rounds 
of verse do we not see stretching heavenward 
with angels ascending and descending ! what 
haunting harmonies hover around us deep and 
eternal like the undying barytone of the sea ! and 
if we are compelled to fare through sands and 
desert wildernesses, how often do we not hear 
airy shapes that syllable our names with a start- 
ling personal appeal to our highest consciousness 
and our noblest aspiration, such as we wait for 
in vain in any other poet ! Landor, in a letter 
to Miss Holford, says admirably of him, "Com- 
mon minds alone can be ignorant what breadth 
of philosophy, what energy and intensity of 
thought, what insight into the heart, and what 
observation of Nature are requisite for the pro- 
duction of such poetry." 

Take from Wordsworth all which an honest 
criticism cannot but allow, and what is left will 
show how truly great he was. He had no hu- 
mor, no dramatic power, and his temperament 
was of that dry and juiceless quality, that in all 
his published correspondence you shall not find 
a letter, but only essays. If we consider care- 



212 WORDSWORTH 

fully where he was most successful, we shall find 
that it was not so much in description of natural 
scenery, or delineation of character, as in vivid 
expression of the effect produced by external 
objects .and events upon his own mind, and of 
the shape and hue (perhaps momentary) which 
they in turn took from his mood or tempera- 
ment. His finest passages are always mono- 
logues. He had a fondness for particulars, and 
there are parts of his poems which remind us 
of local histories in the undue relative impor- 
tance given to trivial matters. He was the 
historian of Wordsworthshire. This power of 
particularization (for it is as truly a power as 
generalization) is what gives such vigor and 
greatness to single lines and sentiments of 
Wordsworth, and to poems developing a single 
thought or sentiment. It was this that made 
him so fond of the sonnet. That sequestered 
nook forced upon him the limits which his 
fecundity (if I may not say his garrulity) was 
never self-denying enough to impose on itself. 
It suits his solitary and meditative temper, and 
it was there that Lamb (an admirable judge of 
what was permanent in literature) liked him best. 
Its narrow bounds, but fourteen paces from end 
to end, turn into a virtue his too common fault 
of giving undue prominence to every passing 
emotion. He excels in monologue, and the law 
of the sonnet tempers monologue with mercy. 



I 



WORDSWORTH 213 

In " The Excursion " we are driven to the sub- 
terfuge of a French verdict of extenuating cir- 
cumstances. His mind had not that reach and 
elemental movement of Milton's, which, like the 
trade-wind, gathered to itself thoughts and im- 
ages like stately fleets from every quarter ; some 
deep with silks and spicery, some brooding over 
the silent thunders of their battailous armaments, 
but all swept forward in their destined track, 
over the long billows of his verse, every inch of 
canvas strained by the unifying breath of their 
common epic impulse. It was an organ that 
Milton mastered, mighty in compass, capable 
equally of the trumpet's ardors or the slim deli- 
cacy of the flute, and sometimes it bursts forth 
in great crashes through his prose, as if he 
touched it for solace in the intervals of his toil. 
If Wordsworth sometimes put the trumpet to 
his lips, yet he lays it aside soon and willingly 
for his appropriate instrument, the pastoral reed. 
And it is not one that grew by any vulgar stream, 
but that which Apollo breathed through, tend- 
ing the flocks of Admetus, — that which Pan 
endowed with every melody of the visible uni- 
verse, — the same in which the soul of the de- 
spairing nymph took refuge and gifted with her 
dual nature, — so that ever and anon, amid the 
notes of human joy or sorrow, there comes sud- 
denly a deeper and almost awful tone, thrilling 
us into dim consciousness of a forgotten divinity. 



214 WORDSWORTH 

Wordsworth's absolute want of humor, while 
it no doubt confirmed his self-confidence by 
making him insensible both to the comical in- 
congruity into which he was often led by his 
earlier theory concerning the language of poetry 
and to the not unnatural ridicule called forth by 
it, seems to have been Indicative of a certain 
dulness of perception in other directions.' We 

* Nowhere is this displayed with more comic self-compla- 
cency than when he thought it needful to rewrite the ballad of 
Helen of Kirconnel, — a poem hardly to be matched in any 
language for swiftness of movement and savage sincerity of 
feeling. Its shuddering compression is masterly. 

*' Curst be the heart that thought the thought, 
And curst the hand that fired the shot, 
When in my arms burd Helen dropt, 
That died to succor me ! 

" O, think ye not my heart was sair 

When my love dropt down and spake na mair ? " 

Compare this with — 

" Proud Gordon cannot bear the thoughts 
That through his brain are travelling, 
And, starting up, to Bruce's heart 
He launched a deadly javelin; 

Fair Ellen saw it when it came. 

And, stepp'ng forth to meet the same. 

Did with her body cover . 

The Youth, her chosen lover. 

And Bruce (ai soon as he had slain 
The Gordon') sailed away to Spain, 
And fought with rage incessant 
Against the Moorish Crescent." 

These are surely the verses of an attorney's clerk ** penning 
a stanza when he should engross." It will be noticed that 



WORDSWORTH 215 

cannot help feeling that the material of his na- 
ture was essentially prose, which, in his inspired 
moments, he had the power of transmuting, but 
which, whenever the inspiration failed or was 
factitious, remained obstinately leaden. The 
normal condition of many poets would seem to 
approach that temperature to which Words- 
worth's mind could be raised only by the white 
heat of profoundly inward passion. And in 
proportion to the intensity needful to make his 

Wordsworth here also departs from his earlier theory of the 
language of poetry by substituting a javelin for a bullet as less 
modern and familiar. Had he written — 

" And Gordon never gave a hint, 

But, having somewhat picked his flint, 

Let fly the fatal bullet 

That killed that lovely pullet," — 

it would hardly have seemed more like a parody than the rest. 
He shows the same insensibility in a note upon the Ancient 
Mariner in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads: ** The 
poem of my friend has indeed great defects; first, that the 
principal person has no distinct character, either in his profes- 
sion of mariner, or as a human being who, having been long 
under the control of supernatural impressions, might be sup- 
posed himself to partake of something supernatural; secondly, 
that he does not act, but is continually acted upon; thirdly, 
that the events, having no necessary connection, do not pro- 
duce each other; and lastly, that the imagery is somewhat 
Jaboriously accumulated." Here is an indictment, to be sure, 
and drawn, plainly enough, by the attorney's clerk afore- 
named. One would think that the strange charm of Coleridge's 
most truly original poems lay in this very emancipation from 
the laws of cause and effect. 



2i6 WORDSWORTH 

nature thoroughly aglow is the very high quality 
of his best verses. They seem rather the pro- 
ductions of Nature than of man, and have the 
lastingness of such, delighting our age with the 
same startle of newness and beauty that pleased 
our youth. Is it his thought? It has the shift- 
ing inward lustre of diamond. Is it his feeling? 
It is as delicate as the impressions of fossil ferns. 
He seems to have caught and fixed forever 
in immutable grace the most evanescent and 
intangible of our intuitions, the very ripple- 
marks on the remotest shores of being. But this 
intensity of mood which insures high quality is 
by its very nature incapable of prolongation, 
and Wordsworth, in endeavoring it, falls more 
below himself, and is, more even than many 
poets his inferiors in imaginative quality, a poet 
of passages. Indeed, one cannot help having 
the feeling sometimes that the poem is there 
for the sake of these passages, rather than that 
these are the natural jets and elations of a mind 
energized by the rapidity of its own motion. 
In other words, the happy couplet or gracious 
image seems not to spring from the inspiration 
of the poem conceived as a whole, but rather to 
have dropped of itself Into the mind of the poet 
in one of his rambles, who then, in a less rapt 
mood, has patiently built up around it a setting 
of verse too often ungraceful in form and of a 
material whose cheapness may cast a doubt on 



WORDSWORTH 217 

the priceless quality of the gem it encumbers.' 
During the most happily productive period of 
his life, Wordsworth was impatient of what may 
be called the mechanical portion of his art. His 
wife and sister seem from the first to have been 
his scribes. In later years, he had learned and 
often insisted on the truth that poetry was an 
art no less than a gift, and corrected his poems 
in cold blood, sometimes to their detriment. 
But he certainly had more of the vision than of 
the faculty divine, and was always a little numb 
on the side of form and proportion. Perhaps 
his best poem in these respects is the " Lao- 
damia," and it is not uninstructive to learn from 
his own lips that " it cost him more trouble 
than almost anything of equal length he had 
ever written." His longer poems (miscalled 
epical) have no more intimate bond of union 
than their more or less immediate relation to 
his own personality. Of character other than 
his own he had but a faint conception, and all 
the personages of " The Excursion " that are 
not Wordsworth are the merest shadows of 
himself upon mist, for his self-concentrated 

' "A hundred times when, roving high and low, 
I have been harassed with the toil of verse. 
Much pains and little progress, and at once 
Some lovely Image in the song rose up. 
Full-formed, like Venus rising from the sea." 

Prelude, bk. iv. 



2i8 WORDSWORTH 

nature was incapable of projecting itself into 
the consciousness of other men and seeing the 
springs of action at their source in the recesses 
of individual character. The best parts of these 
longer poems are bursts of impassioned solilo- 
quy, and his fingers were always clumsy at the 
callida junctura. The stream of narration is 
sluggish, if varied by times with pleasing reflec- 
tions {yiridesque -placido aequore sylvas) ; we are 
forced to do our own rowing, and only when 
the current is hemmed in by some narrow gorge 
of the poet's personal consciousness do we feel 
ourselves snatched along on the smooth but 
impetuous rush of unmistakable inspiration. 
The fact that what is precious in Wordsworth's 
poetry was (more truly even than with some 
greater poets than he) a gift ratherthan an achieve- 
ment should always be borne in mind in taking 
the measure of his power. I know not whether 
to call it height or depth, this peculiarity of his, 
but it certainly endows those parts of his work 
which we should distinguish as Wordsworthian 
with an unexpectedness and impressiveness of 
originality such as we feel in the presence of 
Nature herself. He seems to have been half 
conscious of this, and recited his own poems to 
all comers with an enthusiasm of wondering 
admiration that would have been profoundly 
comic ' but for its simple sincerity and for the 

* Mr. Emerson tells us that he was at first tempted to smile. 



WORDSWORTH 219 

fact that William Wordsworth, Esquire, of 
Rydal Mount, was one person, and the William 
Wordsworth whom he so heartily reverenced 
quite another. We recognize two voices in him, 
as Stephano did in Caliban. There are Jeremiah 
and his scribe Baruch. If the prophet cease from 
dictating, the amanuensis, rather than be idle, 
employs his pen in jotting down some anecdotes 
of his master, how he one day went out and 
saw an old woman, and the next day did not, 
and so came home and dictated some verses on 
this ominous phenomenon, and how another 
day he saw a cow. These marginal annotations 
have been carelessly taken up into the text, have 
been religiously held by the pious to be ortho- 
dox scripture, and by dexterous exegesis have 
been made to yield deeply oracular meanings. 
Presently the real prophet takes up the word 
again and speaks as one divinely inspired, the 
Voice of a higher and invisible power. Words- 
worth's better utterances have the bare sincerity, 
the absolute abstraction from time and place, the 
immunity from decay, that belong to the grand 
simplicities of the Bible. They seem not more 
his own than ours and every man's, the word 

and Mr. Ellis Yarnall (who saw him in his eightieth year) 
says, •* These quotations [from his own works] he read in a 
way that much impressed me; it seemed almost as if he were 
awed by the greatness of his own power, the gifts with which 
he had been endowed.'''' (The italics are mine.) 



220 WORDSWORTH 

of the inalterable Mind. This gift of his was 
naturally very much a matter of temperament, 
and accordingly by far the greater part of his 
finer product belongs to the period of his prime, 
ere Time had set his lumpish foot on the pedal 
that deadens the nerves of animal sensibility.' 
He did not grow as those poets do in whom the 
artistic sense is predominant. One of the most 
delightful fancies of the Genevese humorist, 
Toepffer, is the poet Albert, who, having had 
his portrait drawn by a highly idealizing hand, 
does his best afterwards to look like it. Many 
of Wordsworth's later poems seem like rather 
unsuccessful efforts to resemble his former self. 
They would never, as Sir John Harrington says 

' His best poetry was written when he was under the im- 
mediate influence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have felt 
this, for it is evidently to Wordsworth that he alludes when 
he speaks of ** those who have been so well pleased that I 
should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills 
into their main stream." (^Letters, Conversations, a?id Re~ 
collections of S. T. C, vol. i. pp. 5, 6.) "Wordsworth 
found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of the 
participles in Shakespeare's line about bees: — 

" 'The singing masons building roofs of gold.' 

This, he said, was a line that Milton never would have written. 
Keats thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in hr^r- 
mony with the continued note of the singers." (Leigh Hunt's 
Autobiography. ) Wordsworth writes to Crabb Robinson in 
1837, ** My ear is susceptible to the clashing of sounds almost 
to disease." One cannot help thinking that his training in 
these niceties was begun by Coleridge. 



WORDSWORTH 221 

of poetry, "keep a child from play and an old 
man from the chimney-corner," ' 

Chief Justice Marshall once blandly inter- 
rupted a junior counsel who was arguing certain 
obvious points of law at needless length, by say- 
ing, " Brother Jones, there are some things which 
a Supreme Court of the United States sitting in 
equity may be presumed to know." Wordsworth 
has this fault of enforcing and restating obvious 
points till the reader feels as if his own intelli- 
gence were somewhat underrated. He is over- 
conscientious in giving us full measure, and once 
profoundly absorbed in the sound of his own 
voice, he knows not when to stop. If he feel 
himself flagging, he has a droll way of keeping 
the floor, as it were, by asking himself a series 
of questions sometimes not needing, and often 
incapable of answer. There are three stanzas of 
such near the close of the First Part of " Peter 
Bell," where Peter first catches a glimpse of the 
dead body in the water, all happily incongruous, 
and ending with one which reaches the height 
of comicality : — 

•' Is it a fiend that to a stake 
Of fire his desperate self is tethering ? 
Or stubborn spirit doomed to yell. 
In solitary ward or cell, 
Ten thousand miles from all his brethren ? " 

The same want of humor which made him 

* In the Preface to his translation q{ the Orlando Furioso. 



222 WORDSWORTH 

insensible to incongruity may perhaps account 
also for the singular unconsciousness of dispro- 
portion which so often strikes us in his poetry. 
For example, a little farther on in " Peter Bell " 
we find : — 

•' Now — like a tempest-shattered bark 
That overwhelmed and prostrate lies. 
And in a moment to the verge 
Is lifted of a foaming surge — 
Full suddenly the Ass doth rise! " 

And one cannot help thinking that the similes 
of the huge stone, the sea-beast, and the cloud, 
noble as they are in themselves, are somewhat 
too lofty for the service to which they are put/ 
The movement of Wordsworth's mind was 
too slow and his mood too meditative for nar- 
rative poetry. He values his own thoughts and 
reflections too much to sacrifice the least of them 
to the interests of his story. Moreover, it is 
never action that interests him, but the subtle 
motives that lead to or hinder it. " The Wag- 
goner" involuntarily suggests a comparison with 
" Tarn O'Shanter " infinitely to its own disad- 
vantage. " Peter Bell," full though it be of pro- 
found touches and subtle analysis, is lumbering 
and disjointed. Even Lamb was forced to con- 
fess that he did not like it. " The White Doe," 
the most Wordsworthian of them all in the best 
meaning of the epithet, is also only the more 
' In Resolution and Independence. 



WORDSWORTH 223 

truly so for being diffuse and reluctant. What 
charms in Wordsworth and will charm forever 

is the 

•' Happy tone 
Of meditation slipping in between 
The beauty coming and the beauty gone.'* 

A few poets, in the exquisite adaptation of their 
words to the tune of our own feelings and fan- 
cies, in the charm of their manner, indefinable 
as the sympathetic grace of woman, are every- 
thing to us without our being able to say that 
they are much in themselves. They rather nar- 
cotize than fortify. Wordsworth must subject 
our mood to his own before he admits us to his 
intimacy ; but, once admitted, it is for life, and 
we find ourselves in his debt, not for what he 
has been to us in our hours of relaxation, but 
for what he has done for us as a reinforcement of 
faltering purpose and personal independence 
of character. His system of a Nature-cure, first 
professed by Dr. Jean Jacques and continued by 
Cowper, certainly breaks down as a whole. The 
Solitary of " The Excursion," who has not been 
cured of his scepticism by living among the 
medicinal mountains, is, so far as we can see, 
equally proof against the lectures of Pedler and 
Parson, Wordsworth apparently felt that this 
would be so, and accordingly never saw his way 
clear to finishing the poem. But the treatment, 
whether a panacea or not, is certainly whole- 



224 WORDSWORTH 

some, inasmuch as It inculcates abstinence, ex- 
ercise, and uncontaminate air. I am not sure, 
indeed, that the Nature-cure theory does not 
tend to foster in constitutions less vigorous than 
Wordsworth's what Milton would call a fugi- 
tive and cloistered virtue at a dear expense of 
manlier qualities. The ancients and our own 
Elizabethans, ere spiritual megrims had become 
fashionable, perhaps made more out of life by 
taking a frank delight in its action and passion 
and by grappling with the facts of this world, 
rather than muddling themselves over the in- 
soluble problems of another. If they had not 
discovered the picturesque, as we understand it, 
they found surprisingly fine scenery in man and 
his destiny, and would have seen something 
ludicrous, it may be suspected, in the spectacle 
of a grown man running to hide his head in 
the apron of the Mighty Mother whenever he 
had an ache in his finger or got a bruise in the 
tussle for existence. 

But when, as I have said, our impartiality has 
made all those qualifications and deductions 
against which even the greatest poet may not 
plead his privilege, what Is left to Wordsworth 
is enough to justify his fame. Even where his 
genius is wrapped In clouds, the unconquerable 
lightning of Imagination struggles through, flash- 
ing out unexpected vistas, and Illuminating the 
humdrum pathway of our daily thought with a 



1 



WORDSWORTH 225 

radiance of momentary consciousness that seems 
like a revelation. If it be the most delightful 
function of the poet to set our lives to music, 
yet perhaps he will be even more sure of our 
maturer gratitude if he do his part also as mor- 
aHst and philosopher to purify and enlighten ; 
if he define and encourage our vacillating per- 
ceptions of duty ; if he piece together our frag- 
mentary apprehensions of our own life and that 
larger life whose unconscious instruments we 
are, making of the jumbled bits of our dissected 
map of experience a coherent chart. In the great 
poets there is an exquisite sensibility both of 
soul and sense that sympathizes like gossamer 
sea-moss with every movement of the element 
in which it floats, but which is rooted on the 
solid rock of our common sympathies. Words- 
worth shows less of this finer feminine fibre of 
organization than one or two of his contempo- 
raries, notably than Coleridge or Shelley ; but 
he was a masculine thinker, and in his more 
characteristic poems there is always a kernel of 
firm conclusion from far-reaching principles that 
stimulates thought and challenges meditation. 
Groping in the dark passages of life, we come 
upon some axiom of his, as it were a wall that 
gives us our bearings and enables us to find 
an outlet. Compared with Goethe we feel that 
he lacks that serene impartiality of mind which 
results from breadth of culture ; nay, he seems 



226 WORDSWORTH 

narrow, insular, almost provincial. He reminds 
us of those saints of Dante who gather bright- 
ness by revolving on their own axis. But through 
this very limitation of range he gains perhaps 
in intensity and the impressiveness which re- 
sults from eagerness of personal conviction. If 
we read Wordsworth through, as I have just 
done, we find ourselves changing our mind about 
him at every other page, so uneven is he. If 
we read our favorite poems or passages only, he 
will seem uniformly great. And even as regards 
" The Excursion " we should remember how few 
long poems will bear consecutive reading. For 
my part I know of but one, — the " Odyssey." 
None of our great poets can be called pop- 
ular in any exact sense of the word, for the 
highest poetry deals with thoughts and emotions 
which inhabit, like rarest sea-mosses, the doubt- 
ful limits of that shore between our abiding 
divine and our fluctuating human nature, rooted 
in the one, but living in the other, seldom laid 
bare, and otherwise visible only at exceptional 
moments of entire calm and clearness. Of no 
other poet except Shakespeare have so many 
phrases become household words as of Words- 
worth. If Pope has made current more epigrams 
of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth belongs the 
nobler praise of having defined for us, and given 
us for a daily possession, those faint and vague 
suggestions of other-worldliness of whose gentle 



WORDSWORTH 227 

ministry with our baser nature the hurry and 
bustle of Hfe scarcely ever allowed us to be 
conscious. He has won for himself a secure 
immortality by a depth of intuition which makes 
only the best minds at their best hours worthy, 
or indeed capable, of his companionship, and 
by a homely sincerity of human sympathy 
which reaches the humblest heart. Our language 
owes him gratitude for the habitual purity and 
abstinence of his style, and we who speak it, 
for having emboldened us to take delight in 
simple things, and to trust ourselves to our own 
instincts. And he hath his reward. It needs 
not to bid 

*' Renowned Spenser, lie a thought more nigh 
To learned Chaucer, and rare Beaumond lie 
A little nearer Spenser " ; — 

for there is no fear of crowding in that little 
society with whom he is now enrolled as fifth in 
the succession of the great English Poets. 



CARLYLE- 

1866 

A FEELING of comical sadness is likely 
to come over the mind of any middle- 
aged man who sets himself to recollect- 
inor the names of different authors that have 
been famous, and the number of contemporary 
immortalities whose end he has seen since com- 
ing to manhood. Many a light, hailed by too 
careless observers as a fixed star, has proved to 
be only a short-lived lantern at the tail of a 
newspaper kite. The literary heaven which our 
youth saw dotted thick with rival glories, we 
find now to have been a stage-sky merely, arti- 
ficially enkindled from behind ; and the cynical 
daylight which is sure to follow all theatrical 
enthusiasms shows us ragged holes where once 
were luminaries, sheer vacancy instead of lustre. 
Our earthly reputations, says a great poet, are 
the color of grass, and the same sun that makes 
the green bleaches it out again. But next morn- 
ing is not the time to criticise the scene-painter's 
firmament, nor is it quite fair to examine coldly 
a part of some general illusion in the absence 
' Apropos of his Frederick the Great. 



i 



CARLYLE 229 

of that sympathetic enthusiasm, that self-surren- 
der of the fancy, which made it what it was. 
It would not be safe for all neglected authors 
to comfort themselves in Wordsworth's fashion, 
inferring genius in an inverse proportion to 
public favor, and a high and solitary merit from 
the world's indifference. On the contrary, it 
would be more just to argue from popularity a 
certain amount of real value, though it may not 
be of that permanent quality which insures en- 
during fame. The contemporary world and 
Wordsworth were both half right. He undoubt- 
edly owned and worked the richest vein of his 
period ; but he offered to his contemporaries 
a heap of gold-bearing quartz where the baser 
mineral made the greater show, and the pur- 
chaser must do his own crushing and smelting, 
with no guaranty but the bare word of the miner. 
It was not enough that certain bolder adven- 
turers should now and then show a nugget in 
proof of the success of their venture. The gold 
of the poet must be refined, moulded, stamped 
with the image and superscription of his time, 
but with a beauty of design and finish that are 
of no time. The work must surpass the mate- 
rial. Wordsworth was wholly void of that shap- 
ing imagination which is the highest criterion 
of a poet. 

Immediate popularity and lasting fame, then, 
would seem to be the result of different quali- 



230 CARLYLE 

ties, and not of mere difference in degree. It is 
safe to prophesy a certain durability of recog- 
nition for any author who gives evidence of 
intellectual force, in whatever kind, above the 
average amount. There are names in literary 
history which are only names; and the works 
associated with them, like acts of Congress 
already agreed on in debate, are read by their 
titles and passed. What is it that insures what 
may be called living fame, so that a book shall 
be at once famous and read ? What is it that 
relegates divine Cowley to that remote, uncivil 
Pontus of the British Poets, and keeps gar- 
rulous Pepys within the cheery circle of the 
evening lamp and fire? Originality, eloquence, 
sense, imagination, not one of them is enough 
by itself, but only in some happy mixture and 
proportion. Imagination seems to possess in 
itself more of the antiseptic property than any 
other single quality ; but, without less showy 
and more substantial allies, it can at best give 
only deathlessness, without the perpetual youth 
that makes it other than dreary. It were easy 
to find examples of this Tithonus immortality, 
setting its victims apart from both gods and 
men ; helpless duration, undying, to be sure, 
but sapless and voiceless also, and long ago de- 
serted by the fickle Hemera. And yet chance 
could confer that gift on Glaucus, which love 
and the consent of Zeus failed to secure for the 



CARLYLE 231 

darling of the Dawn. Is it mere luck, then ? 
Luck may, and often does, have some share in 
ephemeral successes, as in a gambler's winnings 
spent as soon as got, but not in any lasting tri- 
umph over time. Solid success must be based 
on solid qualities and the honest culture of them. 
The first element of contemporary popularity 
is undoubtedly the power of entertaining. If 
a man have anything to tell, the world cannot 
be called upon to listen to him unless he have 
perfected himself in the best way of telling it. 
People are not to be argued into a pleasurable 
sensation, nor is taste to be compelled by any 
syllogism, however stringent. An author may 
make himself very popular, however, and even 
justly so, by appealing to the passion of the 
moment, without having anything in him that 
shall outlast the public whim which he satisfies. 
Churchill is a remarkable example of this. He 
had a surprising extemporary vigor of mind; 
his phrase carries great weight of blow ; he 
undoubtedly surpassed all contemporaries, as 
Cowper says of him, in a certain rude and earth- 
born vigor; but his verse is dust and ashes now, 
solemnly inurned, of course, in the Chalmers 
columbarium, and without danger of violation. 
His brawn and muscle are fading traditions, 
while the fragile, shivering genius of Cowper is 
still a good life on the books of the Critical 
Insurance Office. " It is not, then, loftiness of 



232 CARLYLE 

mind that puts one by the side of Virgil?" cries 
poor old Cavalcanti at his wits' end. Certainly 
not altogether that. There must be also the 
great Mantuan's art ; his power, not only of 
being strong in parts, but of making those parts 
coherent in an harmonious whole, and tributary 
to it. Gray, if we may believe the commenta- 
tors, has not an idea, scarcely an epithet, that he 
can call his own ; and yet he is, in the best sense, 
one of the classics of English literature. He had 
exquisite felicity of choice ; his dictionary had 
no vulgar word in it, no harsh one, but all 
culled from the luckiest moods of poets, and 
with a faint but delicious aroma of association ; 
he had a perfect sense of sound, and one idea 
without which all the poetic outfit (si absit pru- 
dentid) is of little avail, — that of combination 
and arrangement, in short, of art. The poets 
from whom he helped himself have no more 
claim to any of his poems as wholes than the 
various beauties of Greece (if the old story were 
true) to the Venus of the artist. 

Imagination, as we have said, has more vir- 
tue to keep a book alive than any other single 
faculty. Burke is rescued from the usual doom 
of orators, because his learning, his experience, 
his sagacity are rimmed with a halo by this be- 
witching light behind the intellectual eye from 
the highest heaven of the brain. Shakespeare 
has impregnated his common sense with the 



CARLYLE 233 

steady glow of it, and answers the mood of youth 
and age, of high and low, immortal as that date- 
less substance of the soul he wrought in. To 
have any chance of lasting, a book must satisfy, 
not merely some fleeting fancy of the day, but 
a constant longing and hunger of human nature ; 
and it needs only a superficial study of literature 
to be convinced that real fame depends rather 
on the sum of an author's powers than on any 
brilliancy of special parts. There must be wis- 
dom as well as wit, sense no less than imagina- 
tion, judgment in equal measure with fancy, and 
the fiery rocket must be bound fast to the poor 
wooden stick that gives it guidance if it would 
mount and draw all eyes. There are some who 
think that the brooding patience which a great 
work calls for belonged exclusively to an earlier 
period than ours. Others lay the blame on our 
fashion of periodical publication, which necessi- 
tates a sensation and a crisis in every number, 
and forces the writer to strive for startling efi^ects, 
instead of that general lowness of tone which is 
the last achievement of the artist. The simplic- 
ity of antique passion, the homeliness of antique 
pathos, seems not merely to be gone out of fash- 
ion, but out of being as well. Modern poets 
appear rather to tease their words into a fury 
than to infuse them with the deliberate heats of 
their matured conception, and strive to replace 
the rapture of the mind with a fervid intensity 



234 CARLYLE 

of phrase. Our reaction from the decorous 
platitudes of the last century has no doubt led 
us to excuse this, and to be thankful for some- 
thing like real fire, though of stubble ; but our 
prevailing style of criticism, which regards parts 
rather than wholes, which dwells on the beauty 
of passages, and, above all, must have its languid 
nerves pricked with the expected sensation at 
whatever cost, has done all it could to confirm 
us in our evil way. Passages are good when they 
lead to something, when they are necessary parts 
of the building, but they are not good to dwell 
In. This taste for the startling reminds us of 
something which happened once at the burn- 
ing of a country meeting-house. The building 
stood on a hill, and, apart from any other con- 
siderations, the fire was as picturesque as could 
be desired. When all was a black heap, licking 
itself here and there with tongues of fire, there 
rushed up a farmer gasping anxiously, " Hez 
the bell fell yit ? " An ordinary fire was no more 
to him than that on his hearthstone ; even the 
burning of a meeting-house, in itself a vulcanic 
rarity, could not (so long as he was of another 
parish) tickle his outworn palate ; but he had 
hoped for a certain tang in the downcome of the 
bell that might recall the boyish flavor of con- 
flagration. There was something dramatic, no 
doubt, in this surprise of the brazen sentinel at 
his post, but the breathless rustic has always 



CARLYLE 235 

seemed to me a type of the prevailing delusion 
in esthetics. Alas 1 if the bell must fall in every 
stanza or every monthly number, how shall an 
author contrive to stir us at last, unless with 
whole Moscows, crowned with the tintinnabu- 
lary crash of the Kremlin ? For myself I am 
glad to feel that I am still able to find content- 
ment in the more conversational and domestic 
tone of my old-fashioned wood-fire. No doubt 
a great part of our pleasure in reading is unex- 
pectedness, whether in turn of thought or of 
phrase ; but an emphasis out of place, an inten- 
sity of expression not founded on sincerity of 
moral or intellectual conviction, reminds one 
of the underscorings in young ladies' letters, a 
wonder even to themselves under the colder 
north light of matronage. It is the part of the 
critic, however, to keep cool under whatever 
circumstances, and to reckon that the excesses 
of an author will be at first more attractive to 
the many than that average power which shall 
win him attention with a new generation of 
men. It is seldom found out by the majority, 
till after a considerable interval, that he was the 
original man who contrived to be simply nat- 
ural, — the hardest lesson in the school of art 
and the latest learned, if, indeed, it be a thing 
capable of acquisition at all. The most winsome 
and wayward of brooks draws now and then 
some lover's foot to its intimate reserve, while 



236 CARLYLE 

the spirt of a bursting water-pipe gathers a 
gaping crowd forthwith. 

Mr. Carlyle is an author who has now been 
so long before the world that we may feel to- 
ward him something of the unprejudice of pos- 
terity. It has long been evident that he had no 
more ideas to bestow upon us, and that no new 
turn of his kaleidoscope would give us anything 
but some variation of arrangement in the bril- 
liant colors of his style. It is perhaps possible, 
then, to arrive at some not wholly inadequate 
estimate of his place as a writer, and especially 
of the value of the ideas whose advocate he 
makes himself, with a bitterness and violence 
that increase, as it seems to me, in proportion as 
his inward conviction of their truth diminishes. 

The leading characteristics of an author who 
is in any sense original, that is to say, who does 
not merely reproduce, but modifies the influence 
of tradition, culture, and contemporary thought 
upon himself by some admixture of his own, 
may commonly be traced more or less clearly 
in his earliest works. This is more strictly true, 
no doubt, of poets, because the imagination is 
a fixed quantity, not to be increased by any 
amount of study and reflection. Skill, wisdom, 
and even wit are cumulative ; but that diviner 
faculty, which is the spiritual eye, though it 
may be trained and sharpened, cannot be added 
to by taking thought. This has always been 



CARLYLE 237 

something innate, unaccountable, to be laid to a 
happy conjunction of the stars. Goethe, the last 
of the great poets, accordingly takes pains to 
tell us under what planets he was born ; and in 
him it is curious how uniform the imaginative 
quality is from the beginning to the end of his 
long literary activity. His early poems show 
maturity, his mature ones a youthful freshness. 
The apple already lies potentially in the blos- 
som, as that may be traced also by cutting across 
the ripened fruit. With a mere change of em- 
phasis, Goethe might be called an old boy at 
both ends of his career. 

In the earliest authorship of Mr. Carlyle we 
find some not obscure hints of the future man. 
Nearly fifty years ago he contributed a few 
Hterary and critical articles to the Edinburgh 
Encyclopaedia. The outward fashion of them is 
that of the period ; but they are distinguished 
by a certain security of judgment remarkable at 
any time, remarkable especially in one so young. 
British criticism has been always more or less 
parochial ; has never, indeed, quite freed itself 
from sectarian cant and planted itself honestly 
on the aesthetic point of view. It cannot quite 
persuade itself that truth is of immortal essence, 
totally independent of all assistance from quar- 
terly journals or the British army and navy. 
Carlyle, in these first essays, already shows the 
influence of his master, Goethe, the most widely 



238 CARLYLE 

receptive of critics. In a compact notice of Mon- 
taigne, there is not a word as to his religious scep- 
ticism. The character is looked at purely from 
its human and literary sides. As illustrating the 
bent of the author's mind, the following passage 
is most to our purpose : " A modern reader will 
not easily cavil at the patient and good-natured, 
though exuberant egotism which brings back to 
our view ' the form and pressure ' of a time long 
past. T'he habits and humors^ the mode of acting 
and thinkings which characterized a Gascon gentle- 
man in the sixteenth century y cannot fail to amuse 
an inquirer of the nineteenth ; while the faithful 
delineation of human feelings ^ in all their strength 
and weakness y will serve as a mirror to every mind 
' capable of self-examination^ We find here no 
uncertain indication of that eye for the moral 
picturesque, and that sympathetic appreciation 
of character, which within the next few years were 
to make Carlyle the first in insight of English 
critics and the most vivid of English historians. 
In all his earlier writing he never loses sight of 
his master's great rule. Den Gegenstand fest zu 
halten. He accordingly gave to Englishmen the 
first humanly possiblelikeness'of Voltaire, Dide- 
rot, Mirabeau, and others, who had hitherto 
been measured by the usual British standard of 
their respect for the geognosy of Moses and the 
historic credibility of the Books of Chronicles. 
What was the real meaning of this phenomenon? 



CARLYLE 239 

what the amount of this man's honest perform- 
ance in the world ? and in what does he show 
that family likeness, common to all the sons of 
Adam, which gives us a fair hope of being able 
to comprehend him ? These were the questions 
which Carlyle seems to have set himself honestly 
to answer in the critical writings which fill the 
first period of his life as a man of letters. In this 
mood he rescued poor Boswell from the unmer- 
ited obloquy of an ungrateful generation, and 
taught us to see something half-comically beau- 
tiful in the poor, weak creature, with his pathetic 
instinct of reverence for what was nobler, wiser, 
and stronger than himself. Everything that Mr. 
Carlyle wrote during this first period thrills with 
the purest appreciation of whatever is brave and 
beautiful in human nature, with the most vehe- 
ment scorn of cowardly compromise with things 
base ; and yet, immitigable as his demand for the 
highest in us seems to be, there is always some- 
thing reassuring in the humorous sympathy 
with mortal frailty which softens condemnation 
and consoles for shortcoming. The remarkable 
feature ' of Mr. Carlyle's criticism (see, for ex- 
ample, his analysis and exposition of Goethe's 
"Helena") is the sleuth-hound instinct with 
which he presses on to the matter of his theme, 
— never turned aside by a false scent, regard- 
less of the outward beauty of form, sometimes 
almost contemptuous of it, in his hunger after 



24° CARLYLE 

the Intellectual nourishment which It may hide. 
The delicate skeleton of admirably articulated 
and related parts which underlies and sustains 
every true work of art, and keeps It from sinking 
on itself a shapeless heap, he would crush re- 
morselessly to come at the marrow of meaning. 
With him the Ideal sense Is secondary to the 
ethical and metaphysical, and he has but a faint 
conception of their possible unity. 

By degrees the humorous element in his na- 
ture gains ground, till It overmasters all the rest. 
Becoming always more boisterous and obtrusive, 
it ends at last, as such humor must. In cynicism. 
In " Sartor Resartus " It is still kindly, still in- 
fused with sentiment; and the book, with Its 
mixture of Indignation and farce, strikes one as 
might the prophecies of Jeremiah, If the mar- 
ginal comments of the Rev. Mr. Sterne in his 
wildest mood had by some accident been Incor- 
porated with the text. In " Sartor " the marked 
influence of Jean Paul is undeniable, both In 
matter and manner. It Is curious for one who 
studies the action and reaction of national litera- 
tures on each other, to see the humor of Swift 
and Sterne and Fielding, after filtering through 
Richter, reappear in Carlyle with a tinge of Ger- 
manism that makes it novel, alien, or even dis- 
pleasing, as the case may be, to the English 
mind. Unhappily the bit o^ mother from Swift's 
vinegar-barrel has had strength enough to sour 



CARLYLE 24» 

all the rest. The whimsicality of " Tristram 
Shandy," which, even in the original, has too 
often the effect of forethought, becomes a de- 
liberate artifice in Richter, and at last a mere 
mannerism in Carlyle. 

Mr. Carlyle in his critical essays had the 
advantage of a well-defined theme, and of limits 
both in the subject and in the space allowed for 
its treatment, which kept his natural extrava- 
gance within bounds, and compelled some sort 
of discretion and compactness. The great merit 
of these essays lay in a criticism based on wide 
and various study, which, careless of tradition, 
applied its standard to the real and not the con- 
temporary worth of the literary or other perform- 
ance to be judged, and in an unerring eye for 
that fleeting expression of the moral features of 
character, a perception of which alone makes the 
drawing of a coherent likeness possible. Their 
defect was a tendency, gaining strength with 
years, to confound the moral with the aesthetic 
standard, and to make the value of an author's 
work dependent on the general force of his na- 
ture rather than on its special fitness for a given 
task. In proportion as his humor gradually 
overbalanced the other qualities of his mind, his 
taste for the eccentric, amorphous, and violent 
in men became excessive, disturbing more and 
more his perception of the more commonplace 
attributes which give consistency to portraiture. 



242 CARLYLE 

His " French Revolution " is a series of lurid 
pictures, unmatched for vehement power, in 
which the figures of such sons of earth as Mira- 
beau and Danton loom gigantic and terrible as 
in the glare of an eruption, their shadows sway- 
ing far and wide, grotesquely awful. But all is 
painted by eruption flashes in violent light and 
shade. There are no half tints, no gradations, 
and one finds it impossible to account for the 
continuance in power of less Titanic actors in 
the tragedy like Robespierre, on any theory 
whether of human nature or of individual char- 
acter supplied by Mr. Carlyle. Of his success, 
however, in accomplishing what he aimed at, 
which was to haunt the mind with memories of 
a horrible political nightmare, there can be no 
doubt. 

Goethe says, apparently thinking of Richter, 
" The worthy Germans have persuaded them- 
selves that the essence of true humor is form- 
lessness." Heine had not yet shown that a 
German might combine the most airy humor 
with a sense of form as delicate as Goethe's own, 
and that there was no need to borrow the bow 
of Philoctetes for all kinds of game. Mr. Car- 
lyle's own tendency was toward the lawless, and 
the attraction of Jean Paul made it an over- 
mastering one. Goethe, I think, might have 
gone farther, and affirmed that nothing but the 
highest artistic sense can prevent humor from 



CARLYLE 243 

degenerating into the grotesque, and thence 
downwards to utter anarchy. Rabelais is a strik- 
ing example of it. The moral purpose of his 
book cannot give it that unity which the instinct 
and forethought of art only can bring forth. 
Perhaps we owe the masterpiece of humorous 
literature to the fact that Cervantes had been 
trained to authorship in a school where form 
predominated over substance, and the most 
convincing proof of the supremacy of art at the 
highest period of Greek literature is to be found 
in Aristophanes. Mr. Carlyle has no artistic 
sense of form or rhythm, scarcely of proportion. 
Accordingly he looks on verse with contempt 
as something barbarous, — the savage ornament 
which a higher refinement will abolish, as it has 
tattooing and nose-rings. With a conceptive 
imagination vigorous beyond any in his genera- 
tion, with a mastery of language equalled only 
by the greatest poets, he wants altogether the 
plastic imagination, the shaping faculty, which 
would have made him a poet in the highest 
sense. He is a preacher and a prophet, — any- 
thing you will, — but an artist he is not, and 
never can be. It is always the knots and gnarls 
o*f the oak that he admires, never the perfect 
and balanced tree. 

It is certainly more agreeable to be grateful 
for what we owe an author than to blame him 
for what he cannot give us. But it is sometimes 



244 CARLYLE 

the business of a critic to trace faults of style 
and of thought to their root in character and 
temperament, to show their necessary relation 
to, and dependence on, each other, and to find 
some more trustworthy explanation than mere 
wantonness of will for the moral obliquities of a 
man so largely moulded and gifted as Mr. Car- 
lyle. So long as he was merely an exhorter or 
dehorter, we were thankful for such eloquence, 
such humor, such vivid or grotesque images, 
and such splendor of illustration as only he 
could give ; but when he assumes to be a 
teacher of moral and political philosophy, when 
he himself takes to compounding the social 
panaceas he has made us laugh at so often, and 
advertises none as genuine but his own, we 
begin to inquire into his qualifications and his 
defects, and to ask ourselves whether his patent 
pill differ from others except in the larger 
amount of aloes, or have any better recommen- 
dation than the superior advertising powers of 
a mountebank of genius. Comparative criticism 
teaches us that moral and aesthetic defects are 
more nearly related than is commonly supposed. 
Had Mr. Carlyle been fitted out completely 
by nature as an artist, he would have had an 
ideal in his work which would have lifted his 
mind away from the muddier part of him, 
and trained him to the habit of seeking and see- 
ing the harmony rather than the discord and 



CARLYLE 245 

contradiction of things. His innate love of the 
picturesque (which is only another form of the 
sentimentalism he so scoffs at, perhaps as feel- 
ing it a weakness in himself),' once turned in 
the direction of character, and finding its chief 
satisfaction there, led him to look for that ideal 
of human nature in individual men which is but 
fragmentarily represented in the entire race, and 
is rather divined from the aspiration, forever 
disenchanted to be forever renewed, of the im- 
mortal part in us, than found in any example 
of actual achievement. A wiser temper would 
have seen something more consoling than dis- 
heartening in the continual failure of men emi- 
nently endowed to reach the standard of this 
spiritual requirement, would perhaps have found 
in it an inspiring hint that it is mankind, and not 
special men, that are to be shaped at last into 
the image of God, and that the endless life of 
the generations may hope to come nearer that 
goal of which the short-breathed threescore years 
and ten fall too unhappily short. 

But Mr. Carlyle has invented the Hero-cure, 
and all who recommend any other method, or 
see any hope of healing elsewhere, are either 
quacks and charlatans or their victims. His 

* Thirty years ago, when this was written, I ventured only 
a hint that Carlyle was essentially a sentimentalist. In what 
has been published since his death I find proof of what I had 
divined rather than definitely formulated. (1888.) 



246 CARLYLE 

lively imagination conjures up the image of an 
impossible he, as contradictorily endowed as the 
chief personage in a modern sentimental novel, 
who, at all hazards, must not lead mankind like 
a shepherd, but bark, bite, and otherwise worry 
them toward the fold like a truculent sheep-dog. 
If Mr. Carlyle would only now and then recol- 
lect that men are men, and not sheep, nay, that 
the farther they are from being such, the more 
well grounded our hope of one day making 
something better of them ! It is indeed strange 
that one who values Will so highly in the 
greatest should be blind to its infinite worth in 
the least of men ; nay, that he should so often 
seem to confound it with its irritable and pur- 
poseless counterfeit. Wilfulness. The natural 
impatience of an imaginative temperament, 
which conceives so vividly the beauty and de- 
sirableness of a nobler manhood and a diviner 
political order, makes him fret at the slow 
moral processes by which the All-Wise brings 
about his ends, and turns the very foolishness 
of men to his praise and glory. Mr. Carlyle is 
for calling down fire from Heaven whenever he 
cannot readily lay his hand on the match-box. 
No doubt it is somewhat provoking that it 
should be so easy to build castles in the air, and 
so hard to find tenants for them. It is a sin- 
gular intellectual phenomenon to see a man, 
who earlier in life so thoroughly appreciated the 



CARLYLE 247 

innate weakness and futile tendency of the 
"storm and thrust" period of German literature, 
constantly assimilating, as he grows older, more 
and more nearly to its principles and practice. It 
is no longer the sagacious and moderate Goethe 
who is his type of what is highest in human 
nature, but far rather some Gotz of the Iron 
Hand, some asserter of the divine legitimacy 
oi Faustrecht, It is odd to conceive the fate 
of Mr. Carlyle under the sway of any of his 
heroes, how Cromwell would have scorned him 
as a babbler more long-winded than Prynne, but 
less clear and practical, how Friedrich would 
have scoffed at his tirades as dummes Zeug not 
to be compared with the romances of Crebillon 
filsy or possibly have clapped him in a marching 
regiment as a fit subject for the cane of the 
sergeant. Perhaps something of Mr. Carlyle's 
irritability is to be laid to the account of his 
early schoolmastership at Kirkcaldy. This great 
booby World is such a dull boy, and will not 
learn the lesson we have taken such pains in 
expounding for the fiftieth time. Well, then, 
if eloquence, if example, if the awful warning of 
other little boys who neglected their accidence 
and came to the gallows, if none of these avail, 
the birch at least is left, and we will try that. 
The dominie spirit has become every year 
more obtrusive and intolerant in Mr. Carlyle's 
writing, and the rod, instead of being kept in 



248 CARLYLE 

its place as a resource for desperate cases, has 
become the alpha and omega of all successful 
training, the one divinely appointed means of 
human enlightenment and progress, in short, the 
final hope of that absurd animal who fancies 
himself a little lower than the angels. Have we 
feebly taken it for granted that the distinction 
of man was reason ? Never was there a more 
fatal misconception. It is in the gift of unreason 
that we are unenviably distinguished from the 
brutes, whose nobler privilege of instinct saves 
them from our blunders and our crimes. 

But since Mr. Carlyle has become possessed 
with the hallucination that he is head-master of 
this huge boys' school which we call the World, 
his pedagogic birch has grown to the taller pro- 
portions and more ominous aspect of a gallows. 
His article on Dr. Francia was a panegyric of 
the halter, in which the gratitude of mankind is 
invoked for the self-appointed dictator who had 
discovered in Paraguay a tree more beneficent 
than that which produced the Jesuits' bark. 
Mr. Carlyle seems to be in the condition of a 
man who uses stimulants, and must increase his 
dose from day to day as the senses become 
dulled under the spur. He began by admir- 
ing strength of character and purpose and the 
manly self-denial which makes a humble fortune 
great by steadfast loyalty to duty. He has gone 
on till mere strength has become such washy 



CARLYLE 249 

weakness that there is no longer any titillation in 
it; and nothing short of downright violence will 
rouse his nerves now to the needed excitement. 
At first he made out very well with remarkable 
men ; then, lessening the water and increasing 
the spirit, he took to Heroes : and now he must 
have downright /^humanity, or the draught has 
no savor ; so he gets on at last to Kings, types 
of remorseless Force, who maintain the political 
views of Berserkers by the legal principles of 
Lynch. Constitutional monarchy is a failure, re- 
presentative government is a gabble, democracy 
a birth of the bottomless pit; there is no hope 
for mankind except in getting themselves under 
a good driver who shall not spare the lash. And 
yet, unhappily for us, these drivers are provi- 
dential births not to be contrived by any cun- 
ning of ours, and Friedrich II. is hitherto the 
last of them. Meanwhile the world's wheels 
have got fairly stalled in mire and other matter 
of every vilest consistency and most disgustful 
smell. What are we to do ? Mr. Carlyle will 
not let us make a lever with a rail from the next 
fence, or call in the neighbors. That would be 
too commonplace and cowardly, too anarchical. 
No ; he would have us sit down beside him in 
the slough and shout lustily for Hercules. If 
that indispensable demigod will not or cannot 
come, we can find a useful and instructive sol- 
ace, during the intervals of shouting, in a hearty 



250 CARLYLE 

abuse of human nature, which, at the long last, 
is always to blame. 

Since " Sartor Resartus " Mr. Carlyle has 
done little but repeat himself with increasing 
emphasis and heightened shrillness. Warning 
has steadily heated toward denunciation, and re- 
monstrance soured toward scolding. The image 
of the Tartar prayer-mill, which he borrowed 
from Richter and turned to such humorous 
purpose, might be applied to himself. The same 
phrase comes round and round, only the ma- 
chine, being a little crankier, rattles more, and 
the performer is called on for a more visible ex- 
ertion. If there be not something very like cant 
in Mr. Carlyle's later writings, then cant is not 
the repetition of a creed after it has become a 
phrase by the cooling of that white-hot convic- 
tion which once made it both the light and 
warmth of the soul. I do not mean intentional 
and deliberate cant, but neither is that which 
Mr. Carlyle denounces so energetically in his 
fellow men of that conscious kind. I do not mean 
to blame him for it, but mention it rather as an 
interesting phenomenon of human nature. The 
stock of ideas which mankind has to work with 
is very limited, like the alphabet, and can at best 
have an air of freshness given it by new arrange- 
ments and combinations, or by application to 
new times and circumstances. Montaigne is but 
Ecclesiastes writing in the sixteenth century. 



CARLYLE 251 

Voltaire but Lucian in the eighteenth. Yet both 
are original, and so certainly is Mr. Carlyle, 
whose borrowing is mainly from his own former 
works. But he does this so often and so openly 
that we may at least be sure that he ceased grow- 
ing a number of years ago, and is a remarkable 
example of arrested development. 

The cynicism, however, which has now be- 
come the prevailing temper of his mind, has gone 
on expanding with unhappy vigor. In Mr, Car- 
lyle it is not, certainly, as in Swift, the result of 
personal disappointment, and of the fatal eye 
of an accomplice for the mean qualities by which 
power could be attained that it might be used 
for purposes as mean. It seems rather the natu- 
ral corruption of his exuberant humor. Humor 
in its first analysis is a perception of the incon- 
gruous, and in its highest development, of the 
incongruity between the actual and the ideal in 
men and life. With so keen a sense of the ludi- 
crous contrast between what men might be, nay, 
wish to be, and what they are, and with a vehe- 
ment nature that demands the instant realization 
of his vision of a world altogether heroic, it is 
no wonder that Mr. Carlyle, always hoping for 
a thing and always disappointed, should become 
bitter. Perhaps if he expected less he would find 
more. Saul seeking his father's asses found him- 
self turned suddenly into a king; but Mr. Car- 
lyle, on the lookout for a king, always seems to 



252 CARLYLE 

find the other sort of animal. He sees nothing 
on any side of him but a procession of the Lord 
of Misrule, in gloomier moments, a Dance of 
Death, where everything is either a parody of 
whatever is noble, or an aimless jig that stumbles 
at last into the annihilation of the grave, and so 
passes from one nothing to another. Is a world, 
then, which buys and reads Mr. Carlyle's works 
distinguished only for its " fair, large ears " ? If 
he who has read and remembered so much would 
only now and then call to mind the old proverb, 
Nee deus^ nee lupus ^ sed homo I If he would only 
recollect that, from the days of the first grand- 
father, everybody has remembered a golden age 
behind him ! No doubt Adam depreciated the 
apple which the little Cain on his knee was 
crunching, by comparison with those he himself 
had tasted in Eden. 

The very qualities, it seems to me, which came 
so near making a great poet of Mr. Carlyle, dis- 
qualify him for the office of historian. The 
poet's concern is with the appearances of things, 
with their harmony in that whole which the 
imagination demands for its satisfaction, and 
their truth to that ideal nature which is the pro- 
per object of poetry. History, unfortunately, is 
very far from being ideal, still farther from an 
exclusive interest in those heroic or typical fig- 
ures which answer all the wants of the epic and 
the drama and fill their utmost artistic limits. 



CARLYLE 253 

Mr. Carlyle has an unequalled power and vivid- 
ness in painting detached scenes, in bringing out 
in their full relief the oddities or peculiarities of 
character ; but he has a far feebler sense of those 
gradual changes of opinion, that strange com- 
munication of sympathy from mind to mind, 
that subtle influence of very subordinate actors 
in giving a direction to policy or action, which 
we are wont somewhat vaguely to call the pro- 
gress of events. His scheme of history is purely 
an epical one, where only leading figures appear 
by name and are in any strict sense operative. 
He has no conception of the people as anything 
else than an element of mere brute force in 
political problems, and would snif^ scornfully at 
that unpicturesque common sense of the many, 
which comes slowly to its conclusions, no doubt, 
but compels obedience even from rulers the m.ost 
despotic when once its mind is made up. His 
history of Frederick is, of course, a Fritziad; 
but next to his hero, the cane of the drill-ser- 
geant and iron ramrods appear to be the condi- 
tions which to his mind satisfactorily account for 
the result of the Seven Years* War. It is our 
opinion, which subsequent events seem to jus- 
tify, that, had there not been in the Prussian 
people a strong instinct of nationality, Protest- 
ant nationality too, and an intimate conviction 
of its advantages, the war might have ended 
quite otherwise. Frederick II. left the machine 



254 CARLYLE 

of war which he received from his father even 
more perfect than he found it, yet within a few 
years of his death it went to pieces before the 
shock of French armies animated by an idea. 
Again a few years, and the Prussian soldiery, 
inspired once more by the old national fervor, 
were victorious. After all, is it not moral forces 
that make the heaviest battalions, other things 
being tolerably equal ? Were it not for the 
purely picturesque bias of Mr. Carlyle's genius, 
for the necessity which his epical treatment lays 
upon him of always having a protagonist, we 
should be astonished that an idealist like him 
should have so little faith in ideas and so much 
in matter. 

Mr. Carlyle's manner is not so well suited to 
the historian as to the essayist. He is always 
great in single figures and striking episodes, but 
there is neither gradation nor continuity. He 
has extraordinary patience and conscientiousness 
in the gathering and sifting of his material, but 
is scornful of commonplace facts and characters, 
impatient of whatever will not serve for one of 
his clever sketches, or group well in a more 
elaborate figure-piece. He sees history, as it 
were, by flashes of lightning. A single scene, 
whether a landscape or an interior, a single 
figure or a wild mob of men, whatever may be 
snatched by the eye in that instant of intense 
illumination, is minutely photographed upon 



CARLYLE 255 

the memory. Every tree and stone, almost every 
blade of grass ; every article of furniture in a 
room ; the attitude or expression, nay, the very 
buttons and shoe-ties of a principal figure ; the 
gestures of momentary passion in a wild throngs 
— everything leaps into vision under that sud- 
den glare with a painful distinctness that leaves 
the retina quivering. The intervals are absolute 
darkness. Mr. Carlyle makes us acquainted with 
the isolated spot where we happen to be when 
the flash comes, as if by actual eyesight, but 
there is no possibility of a comprehensive view. 
No other writer compares with him for vivid- 
ness. He is himself a witness, and makes us 
witnesses of whatever he describes. This is 
genius beyond a question, and of a very rare 
quality, but it is not history. He has 'not the 
cold-blooded impartiality of the historian ; and 
while he entertains us, moves us to tears or 
laughter, makes us the unconscious captives of 
his ever-changeful mood, we find that he has 
taught us comparatively little. His imagination 
is so powerful that it makes him the contempo- 
rary of his characters, and thus his history seems 
to be the memoirs of a cynical humorist, with 
hearty likes and dislikes, with something of 
acridity in his partialities whether for or against, 
more keenly sensitive to the grotesque than to 
the simply natural, and who enters in his diary, 
even of what comes within the range of his own 



256 CARLYLE 

observation, only so much as amuses his fancy, 
is congenial with his humor, or feeds his pre- 
judice. Mr. Carlyle's method is accordingly 
altogether pictorial, his hasty temper making 
narrative wearisome to him. In his " Friedrich," 
for example, we get very little notion of the civil 
administration of Prussia ; and when he comes, 
in the last volume, to his hero's dealings with 
civil reforms, he confesses candidly that it would 
tire him too much to tell us about it, even if 
he knew anything at all satisfactory himself. 

Mr. Carlyle's historical compositions arewon- 
derful prose poems, full of picture, incident, 
humor, and character, where we grow familiar 
with his conception of certain leading person- 
ages, and even of subordinate ones, if they are 
necessary to the scene, so that they come out 
living upon the stage from the dreary limbo of 
names ; but this is no more history than the 
historical plays of Shakespeare. There is no- 
thing in imaginative literature superior in its own 
way to the episode of Voltaire in the Fritziad. 
It is delicious in humor, masterly in minute 
characterization. We feel as if the principal 
victim (for we cannot help feeling all the while 
that he is so) of this mischievous genius had 
been put upon the theatre before us by some 
perfect mimic like Foote, who had studied his 
habitual gait, gestures, tones, turn of thought, 
costume, trick of feature, and rendered them 



CARLYLE 257 

•with the slight dash of caricature needful to 
make the whole composition tell. It is in such 
things that Mr. Carlyle is beyond all rivalry, 
and that we must go back to Shakespeare for a 
comparison. But the mastery of Shakespeare is 
shown perhaps more strikingly in his treatment 
of the ordinary than of the exceptional. His 
is the gracious equality of Nature herself. Mr. 
Carlyle's gift is rather in the representation than 
in the evolution of character ; and it is a neces- 
sity of his art, therefore, to exaggerate slightly 
his heroic, and to caricature in like manner his 
comic parts. His appreciation is less psycholog- 
ical than physical and external. Grimm relates 
that Garrick, riding once with Preville, proposed 
to him that they should counterfeit drunkenness. 
They rode through Passy accordingly, deceiving 
all who saw them. When beyond the town 
Preville asked how he had succeeded. " Excel- 
lently," said Garrick, " as to your body ; but 
your legs were not tipsy." Mr. Carlyle would 
be as exact in his observation of nature as the 
great actor, and would make us see a drunken 
man as well ; but we doubt whether he could 
have conceived that unmatchable scene in "An- 
tony and Cleopatra," where the tipsiness of 
Lepidus pervades the whole metaphysical no 
less than the physical partof the triumvir. If his 
sympathies bore any proportion to his instinct 
for catching those traits which are the expression 



258 CARLYLE 

of character, but not character itself, we might 
have had a great historian in him instead of a his- 
tory-painter. But that which is a main element in 
Mr. Carlyle's talent, and does perhaps more than 
anything else to make it effective, is a defect 
of his nature. The cynicism which renders him 
so entertaining precludes him from any just 
conception of men and their motives, and from 
any sane estimate of the relative importance of 
the events which concern them. I remember a 
picture of Hamon's, where before a Punch's 
theatre are gathered the wisest of mankind in 
rapt attention. Socrates sits on a front bench, 
absorbed in the spectacle, and in the corner 
stands Dante making entries in his note-book. 
Mr. Carlyle as an historian leaves us in some- 
what such a mood. The world is a puppet- 
show, and when we have watched the play out, 
we depart with a half-comic consciousness of 
the futility of all human enterprise, and the 
ludicrousness of all man's action and passion 
on the stage of the world. Simple, kindly, blun- 
dering Oliver Goldsmith was after all wiser, 
and his Vicar, ideal as Hector and not less 
immortal, is a demonstration of the perennial 
beauty and heroism of the homeliest human 
nature. The cynical view is congenial to certain 
moods, and is so little inconsistent with original 
nobleness of mind that it is not seldom the 
acetous fermentation of it ; but it is the view 



CARLYLE 259 

of the satirist, not of the historian, and takes in 
but a narrow arc in the circumference of truth. 
Cynicism in itself is essentially disagreeable. It 
is the intellectual analogue of the truffle ; and 
though it may be very well in giving a relish to 
thought for certain palates, it cannot supply the 
substance of it. Mr. Carlyle's cynicism is not 
that high-bred weariness of the outsides of life 
which we find in Ecclesiastes. It goes much 
deeper than that to the satisfactions, not of the 
body or the intellect, but of the very soul as 
well. It vaunts itself; it is noisy and aggressive. 
What the wise master puts into the mouth of 
desperate ambition, thwarted of the fruit of its 
crime, as the fitting expression of passionate 
sophistry, seems to have become an article of 
his creed. With him 

** Life is a tale 
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. 
Signifying nothing." 

He goes about with his Diogenes dark lantern, 
professing to seek a man, but inwardly resolved 
to find a monkey. He loves to flash it sud- 
denly on poor human nature in some ridicu- 
lous or degrading posture. He admires still, or 
keeps affirming that he admires, the doughty, 
silent, hard-working men who go honestly 
about their business ; but when we come to his 
later examples, we find that it is not loyalty to 



26o CARLYLE 

duty or to an inward ideal of high-mindedness 
that he finds admirable in them, but a blind 
unquestioning vassalage to whomsoever it has 
pleased him to set up for a hero. He would 
fain replace the old feudalism with a spiritual 
counterpart, in which there shall be an obliga- 
tion to soul service. He who once popularized 
the word flunkey by ringing the vehement 
changes of his scorn upon it, is at last forced 
to conceive an ideal flunkeyism to squire the 
hectoring Don Belianises of his fancy about the 
world. Failing this, his latest theory of Divine 
government seems to be the cudgel. Poets 
have sung all manner of vegetable loves ; Pe- 
trarch has celebrated the laurel, Chaucer the 
daisy, and Wordsworth the gallows-tree ; it 
remained for the ex-pedagogue of Kirkcaldy to 
become the volunteer laureate of the rod and 
to imagine a world created and directed by a 
divine Dr. Busby. We cannot help thinking 
that Mr. Carlyle might have learned something 
to his advantage by living a few years in the 
democracy which he scoffs at as heartily a priori 
as if it were the demagogism which Aristo- 
phanes derided from experience. The hero, as 
Mr. Carlyle understands him, was a makeshift 
of the past ; and the ideal of manhood is to be 
found hereafter in free communities, where the 
state shall at length sum up and exemplify in 
itself all those qualities which poets were forced 



CARLYLE 261 

to Imagine and typify because they could not 
find them in the actual world. 

In the earlier part of his literary career, 
Mr. Carlyle was the denouncer of shams, the 
preacher-up of sincerity, manliness, and a liv- 
ing faith, instead of a droning ritual. He had 
intense convictions, and he made disciples. 
With a compass of diction unequalled by any 
other public performer of the time, ranging as 
it did from the unbookish freshness of the 
Scottish peasant to the most far-sought phrase 
of literary curiosity, with humor, pathos, and 
eloquence at will, it was no wonder that he 
found eager listeners in a world longing for a 
sensation, and forced to put up with the West- 
End gospel of " Pelham." If not a profound 
thinker, he had what was next best, — he felt 
profoundly, and his cry came out of the depths. 
The stern Calvinism of his early training was 
rekindled by his imagination to the old fer- 
vor of Wishart and Brown, and became a new 
phenomenon as he reproduced It subtilized by 
German transcendentalism and German cul- 
ture. Imagination, If it lay hold of a Scotchman, 
possesses him in the old demoniac sense of 
the word, and that hard logical nature, if the 
Hebrew fire once get fair headway in it, burns 
unquenchable as an anthracite coal-mine. But 
to utilize these sacred heats, to employ them, 
as a literary man is always tempted, to keep 



262 CARLYLE 

the domestic pot a-boiling, — is such a thing 
possible ? Only too possible, we fear ; and 
Mr. Carlyle is an example of it. If the languid 
public long for a sensation, the excitement of 
making one becomes also a necessity of the 
successful author, as the intellectual nerves 
grow duller and the old inspiration that came 
unbidden to the bare garret grows shier and 
shier of the comfortable parlor. As he himself 
said thirty years ago of Edward Irving, "Un- 
consciously, for the most part in deep uncon- 
sciousness, there was now the impossibility to 
live neglected, — to walk on the quiet paths 
where alone it is well with us. Singularity 
must henceforth succeed singularity. O foulest 
Circean draught, thou poison of Popular Ap- 
plause ! madness is in thee and death ; thy end 
is Bedlam and the grave." Mr. Carlyle won 
his first successes as a kind of preacher in print. 
His fervor, his oddity of manner, his pugna- 
cious paradox, drew the crowd ; the truth, or, 
at any rate, the faith that underlay them all, 
brought also the fitter audience, though fewer. 
But the curse was upon him ; he must attract, 
he must astonish. Thenceforth he has been 
forced to revamp his telling things ; and the 
oddity, as was inevitable, has become always 
odder, the paradoxes more paradoxical. No 
very large share of truth falls to the appre- 
hension of any one man ; let him keep it sacred. 



CARLYLE 263 

and beware of repeating it till it turn to false- 
hood on his lips by becoming ritual. Truth 
always has a bewitching savor of newness in it, 
and novelty at the first taste recalls that original 
sweetness to the tongue ; but alas for him who 
would make the one a substitute for the other ! 
We seem to miss of late in Mr. Carlyle the old 
sincerity. He has become the purely literary 
man, less concerned about what he says than 
about how he shall say it to best advantage. 
The Muse should be the companion, not the 
guide, says he whom Mr. Carlyle has pro- 
nounced " the wisest of this generation." What 
would be a virtue in the poet is a vice of the 
most fatal kind in the teacher, and, alas that 
we should say it ! the very Draco of shams, 
whose code contained no penalty milder than 
capital for the most harmless of them, has 
become at last something very like a sham 
himself. Mr. Carlyle continues to be a voice 
crying in the wilderness, but no longer a voice 
with any earnest conviction behind it, or in a 
wilderness where there is other than imaginary 
privation. Hearing him rebuke us for being 
humbugs and impostors, we are inclined to 
answer, with the ambassador of Philip II., 
when his master reproached him with forget- 
ting substance in ceremony, " Your Majesty 
forgets that you are only a ceremony yourself." 
And Mr. Carlyle's teaching, moreover, if teach- 



264 CARLYLE 

ing we may call it, belongs to what the great 
German, whose disciple he is, condemned as 
the "literature of despair." An apostle to the 
Gentiles might hope for some fruit of his preach- 
ing ; but of what avail an apostle who shouts 
his message down the mouth of the pit to poor 
lost souls, whom he can positively assure only 
that it is impossible to get out ? Mr. Carlyle 
lights up the lanterns of his Pharos after the 
ship is already rolling between the tongue of 
the sea and the grinders of the reef. It is very 
brilliant, and its revolving flashes touch the 
crests of the breakers with an awful pictur- 
esqueness ; but in so desperate a state of things, 
even Dr. Syntax might be pardoned for being 
forgetful of the picturesque. The Toryism 
of Scott sprang from love of the past ; that of 
Carlyle is far more dangerously infectious, for 
it is logically deduced from a deep disdain of 
human nature. 

Browning has drawn a beautiful picture of an 
old king sitting at the gate of his palace to judge 
his people in the calm sunshine of that past 
which never existed outside a poet's brain. It 
is the sweetest of waking dreams, this of abso- 
lute power and perfect wisdom in one supreme 
ruler ; but it is as pure a creation of human 
want and weakness, as clear a witness of mortal 
limitation and incompleteness, as the shoes of 
swiftness, the cloak of darkness, the purse 



CARLYLE 265 

of Fortunatus, and the elixir vitae. It Is the 
natural refuge of imaginative temperaments im- 
patient of our blunders and shortcomings, and, 
given a complete man, all would submit to the 
divine right of his despotism. But alas ! to every 
the most fortunate human birth hobbles up that 
malign fairy who has been forgotten, with hei* 
fatal gift of imperfection ! So far as my experi- 
ence has gone, it has been the very opposite to 
Mr. Carlyle's. Instead of finding men disloyal 
to their natural leader, nothing has ever seemed 
to me so touching as the gladness with which 
they follow him, when they are sure they have 
found him at last. But a natural leader of the 
ideal type is not to be looked for nisi dignus vin- 
dice nodus. The Divine Forethought had been 
cruel in furnishing one for every petty occasion, 
and thus thwarting in all inferior men that price- 
less gift of reason, to develop which, and to 
make it one with free will, is the highest use of 
our experience on earth. Mr. Carlyle was hard 
bestead and very far gone in his idolatry of mere 
■plucky when he was driven to choose Friedrich 
as a hero. A poet, and Mr. Carlyle is nothing 
else, is unwise who yokes Pegasus to a prosaic 
theme which no force of wing can lift from the 
dull earth. Charlemagne would have been a 
wiser choice, far enough in the past for ideal 
treatment, more manifestly the Siegfried of 
Anarchy, and in his rude way the refounder 



266 CARLYLE 

of that empire which is the ideal of despotism 
in the Western world. 

Friedrich was doubtless a remarkable man, 
but surely very far below any lofty standard of 
heroic greatness. He was the last of the Euro- 
pean kings who could look upon his kingdom 
as his private patrimony ; and it was this estate 
of his, this piece of property, which he so 
obstinately and successfully defended. He had 
no idea of country as it was understood by an 
ancient Greek or Roman, as it is understood by 
a modern Englishman or American ; and there 
is something almost pitiful in seeing a man of 
genius like Mr. Carlyle fighting painfully over 
again those battles of the last century which 
settled nothing but the continuance of the Prus- 
sian monarchy, while he saw only the " burning 
of a dirty chimney " in the war which a great 
people was waging under his very eyes for the 
idea of nationality and orderly magistrature, 
and which fixed, let us hope, forever, a bound- 
ary line on the map of history and of man's 
advancement toward self-conscious and respon- 
sible freedom. The true historical genius, as I 
conceive it, is that which can see the nobler 
meaning of events that are near him, as the true 
poet is he who detects the divine in the casual; 
and I somewhat suspect the depth of his insight 
into the past, who cannot recognize the godlike 
of to-day under that disguise in which it always 



CARLYLE ^(^7 

visits us. Shall we hint to Mr. Carlyle that a 
man may look on an heroic age, as well as on an 
heroic master, with the eyes of a valet, as misap- 
preciative certainly, though not so ignoble ? 

What Schiller says of a great poet, that he 
must be a citizen of his age as well as of his 
country, may be said inversely of a great king. 
He should be a citizen of his country as well as 
of his age. Friedrich was certainly the latter in 
its fullest sense ; whether he was, or could have 
been, the former, in any sense, may be doubted. 
The man who spoke and wrote French in pre- 
ference to his mother tongue, who, dying when 
Goethe was already drawing toward his fortieth 
year, Schiller toward his thirtieth, and Lessing 
had been already five years in his grave, could 
yet see nothing but barbarism in German liter- 
ature, had little of the old Teutonic fibre in his 
nature. The man who pronounced the "Nibe- 
lungen Lied " not worth a pinch of priming, had 
little conception of the power of heroic traditions 
in making heroic men, and especially in strength- 
ening that instinct made up of so many indis- 
tinguishable associations which we call love of 
country. Charlemagne, when he caused the old 
songs of his people to be gathered and written 
down, showed a truer sense of the sources of 
national feeling and a deeper political insight. 
This want of sympathy points to the somewhat 
narrow limits of Friedrich 's nature. In spite of 



268 CARLYLE 

Mr. Carlyle's adroit statement of the case (and 
the whole book has an air of being the plea of 
a masterly advocate in mitigation of sentence), 
we feel that his hero was essentially hard, narrow, 
and selfish. His popularity will go for little with 
any one who has studied the trifling and often 
fabulous elements that make up that singular 
compound. A bluntness of speech, a shabby 
uniform, a frugal camp equipage, a timely famil- 
iarity, may make a man the favorite of an army 
or a nation, — above all, if he have the knack 
of success. Moreover, popularity is much more 
easily won from above downward, and is bought 
at a better bargain by kings and generals than 
by other men. We doubt if Friedrich would 
have been liked as a private person, or even as 
an unsuccessful king. He apparently attached 
very few people to himself, fewer even than his 
brutal old Squire Western of a father. His sister 
Wilhelmina is perhaps an exception. We say 
perhaps, for we do not know how much the 
heroic part he was called on to play had to do 
with the matter, and whether sisterly pride did 
not pass even with herself for sisterly affection. 
Moreover she was far from him ; and Mr. 
Carlyle waves aside, in his generous fashion, 
some rather keen comments of hers on her 
brother's character when she visited Berlin after 
he had become king. Indeed, he is apt to deal 
rather contemptuously with all adverse criticism 



CARLYLE 269 

of his hero. I sympathize with his impulse in 
this respect, agreeing heartily as I do in Chau- 
cer's scorn of those who '•'' gladlie demen to the 
baser end " in such matters. But I am not quite 
sure if this be a safe method with the historian. 
He must doubtless be the friend of his hero if 
he would understand him, but he must be more 
the friend of truth if he would understand his- 
tory. Mr. Carlyle's passion for truth is intense, 
as befits his temper, but it is that of a lover for 
his mistress. He would have her all to himself, 
and has a lover's conviction that no one is able, 
or even fit, to appreciate her but himself. He 
does well to despise the tittle-tattle of vulgar 
minds, but surely should not ignore all testi- 
mony on the other side. For ourselves, we 
think, it not unimportant that Goethe's friend 
Knebel, a man not incapable of admiration, and 
who had served a dozen years or so as an officer 
of Friedrich's guard, should have bluntly called 
him " the tyrant." 

Mr. Carlyle's history traces the family of his 
hero down from its beginnings in the pictur- 
esque chiaro-scuro of the Middle Ages. It was 
an able and above all a canny house, a Scotch 
version of the word able^ which implies thrift 
and an eye to the main chance, the said main 
chance or chief end of man being altogether 
of this world. Friedrich, inheriting this family 
faculty in full measure, was driven, partly by 



270 CARLYLE 

ambition, partly by necessity, to apply it to war. 
He did so, with the success to be expected where 
a man of many expedients has the good luck to 
be opposed by men with few. He adds another 
to the many proofs that it is possible to be a 
great general without a spark of that divine fire 
which we call genius, and that good fortune in 
war results from the same prompt talent and 
unbending temper which lead to the same result 
in the peaceful professions. Friedrich had cer- 
tainly more of the temperament of genius than 
Marlborough or Wellington ; but not to go 
beyond modern instances, he does not impress 
us with the massive breadth of Napoleon, or 
attract us with the climbing ardor of Turenne. 
To compare him with Alexander, or Hannibal, 
or Cassar, were absurd. The kingship that was 
in him, and which won Mr. Carlyle to be his 
biographer, is that of will merely, of rapid and 
relentless command. For organization he had a 
masterly talent ; but he could not apply it to the 
arts of peace, both because he wanted experience 
and because the rash decision of the battle-field 
will not serve in matters which are governed by 
natural laws of growth. He seems, indeed, to 
have had a coarse, soldier's contempt for all civil 
distinction, altogether unworthy of a wise king, 
or even of a prudent one. He confers the title 
of Hofrath on the husband of a woman with 
whom his General Walrave is living in what Mr. 



CARLYLE 271 

Carlyle justly calls " brutish polygamy," and 
this at Walrave's request, on the ground that 
" a general's drab ought to have a handle to her 
name." Mr. Carlyle murmurs in a mild paren- 
thesis that "we rather regret this"! (Vol. iii. 
p. 559.) This is his usual way of treating un- 
pleasant matters, sidling by with a deprecating 
shrug of the shoulders. Not that he ever wil- 
fully suppresses anything. On the contrary, 
there is no greater proof of his genius than the 
way in which, while he seems to paint a charac- 
ter with all its disagreeable traits, he contrives 
to win our sympathy for it, nay, almost our 
liking. This is conspicuously true of his por- 
trait of Friedrich's father ; and that he does not 
succeed in making Friedrich himself attractive 
is a strong argument with us that the fault is in 
the subject and not the artist. 

The book, it is said, has been comparatively 
unsuccessful as a literary venture. Nor do we 
wonder at it. It is disproportionately long, and 
too much made up of those descriptions of bat- 
tles, to read which seems even more difficult 
than to have won the victory itself, more dis- 
heartening than to have suffered the defeat. To 
an American, also, the warfare seemed Lllipu- 
tian in the presence of a conflict so much larger 
in its proportions and significant in its results. 
The interest, moreover, flags decidedly toward 
the close, where the reader cannot help feeling 



272 CARLYLE 

that the author loses breath somewhat painfully 
under the effort of so prolonged a course. Mr. 
Carlyle has evidently devoted to his task a labor 
that may be justly called prodigious. Not only 
has he sifted all the German histories and me- 
moirs, but has visited every battle-field, and de- 
scribes them with an eye for country that is 
without rival among historians. The book is 
evidently an abridgment of even more abundant 
collections, and yet, as it stands, the matter 
overburdens the work. It is a bundle of lively 
episodes rather than a continuous narrative. In 
this respect it contrasts oddly with the concinnity 
of his own earlier " Life of Schiller." But the 
episodes are lively, the humor and pathos spring 
from a profound nature, the sketches of character 
are masterly, the seizure of every picturesque 
incident infallible, and the literary judgments 
those of a thorough scholar and critic. There 
is, of course, the usual amusing objurgation of 
Dryasdust and his rubbish-heaps, the usual as- 
sumption of omniscience, and the usual certainty 
of the Duchess de la Ferte being always in the 
right; yet I cannot help thinking that a little of 
Dryasdust's ploddingexactness would have saved 
Fouquet eleven years of the imprisonment to 
which Mr. Carlyle condemns'him, would have 
referred us to St. Simon rather than to Voltaire 
for the character of the brothers Belle-Ile, and 
would have kept clear of a certain ludicrous 



CARLYLE 27^ 

etymology of the name Antwerp, not to mention 
some other trifling sHps of the like nature. In 
conclusion, after saying, as an honest critic must, 
that "The History of Friedrich II. called Fred- 
erick the Great " is a book to be read in with 
more satisfaction than to be read through, after 
declaring that it is open to all manner of criticism, 
especially in point of moral purpose and tend- 
ency, I must admit with thankfulness that it has 
the one prime merit of being the work of a man 
who has every quality of a great poet except that 
supreme one of rhythm, which shapes both mat- 
ter and manner to harmonious proportion, and 
that where it is good, it is good as only genius 
knows how to be. 

With the gift of song, Carlyle would have 
been the greatest of epic poets since Homer. 
Without it, to modulate and harmonize and bring 
parts into their proper relation, he is the most 
amorphous of humorists, the most shining ava- 
tar of whim the world has ever seen. Beginning 
with a hearty contempt for shams, he has come 
at length to believe in brute force as the only 
reality, and has as little sense of justice as Thack- 
eray allowed to women. I say brute force because, 
though the theory is that this force should be 
directed by the supreme intellect for the time 
being, yet all inferior wits are treated rather as 
obstacles to be contemptuously shoved aside 
than as ancillary forces to be conciliated through 



274 CARLYLE 

their reason. But, with all deductions, he remains 
the profoundest critic and the most dramatic 
imagination of modern times. Never was there 
a more striking example of that ingenium perfer- 
vidum long ago said to be characteristic of his 
countrymen. His is one of the natures, rare in 
these latter centuries, capable of rising to a white 
heat ; but once fairly kindled, he is like a three- 
decker on fire, and his shotted guns go off, as 
the glow reaches them, alike dangerous to friend 
or foe. Though he seems more and more to con- 
found material with moral success, yet there is 
always something wholesome in his unswerving 
loyalty to reality, as he understands it. History, 
in the true sense, he does not and cannot write, 
for he looks on mankind as a herd without voli- 
tion, and without moral force ; but such vivid 
pictures of events, such living conceptions of 
character, we find nowhere else in prose. The 
figures of most historians seem like dolls stufl^ed 
with bran, whose whole substance runs out 
through any hole that criticism may tear in them, 
but Carlyle's are so real in comparison, that, if 
you prick them, they bleed. He seems a little 
wearied, here and there, in his " Friedrich," with 
the multiplicity of detail, and does his filling-in 
rather shabbily ; but he still remains in his own 
way, like his hero, the Only, and such episodes 
as that of Voltaire would make the fortune 
of any other writer. Though not the safest of 



CARLYLE 275 

guides in politics or practical philosophy, his 
value as an inspirer and awakener cannot be 
overestimated. It is a power which belongs 
only to the highest order of minds, for it is none 
but a divine fire that can so kindle and irradiate. 
The debt due him from those who listened to 
the teachings of his prime for revealing to them 
what sublime reserves of power even the hum- 
blest may find in manliness, sincerity, and self- 
reliance, can be paid with nothing short of re- 
verential gratitude. As a purifier of the sources 
whence our intellectual inspiration is drawn, his 
influence has been second only to that of Words- 
worth, if even to his. Indeed he has been in no 
fanciful sense the continuator of Wordsworth's 
moral teaching. 



EMERSON THE LECTURER 

1861-68 

IT is a singular fact that Mr. Emerson is the 
most steadily attractive lecturer in America. 
Into that somewhat cold-waterish region ad- 
venturers of the sensational kind come down now 
and then with a splash, to become disregarded 
King Logs before the next season. But Mr. 
Emerson always draws. A lecturer now for 
something like a third of a century, one of the 
pioneers of the lecturing system, the charm of 
his voice, his manner, and his matter has never 
lost its power over his earlier hearers, and contin- 
ually winds new ones in its enchanting meshes. 
What they do not fully understand they take on 
trust, and listen, saying to themselves, as the 
old poet of Sir Philip Sidney, — 

♦* A sweet, attractive, kind of grace, 
A full assurance given by looks, 
Continual comfort in a face. 

The lineaments of gospel books." 

We call it a singular fact, because we Yankees 
are thought to be fond of the spread-eagle style, 
and nothing can be more remote from that than 
his. We are reckoned a practical folk, who 



EMERSON THE LECTURER ^11 

would rather hear about a new air-tight stove 
than about Plato ; yet our favorite teacher's 
practicality is not in the least of the Poor Rich- 
ard variety. If he have any Buncombe constitu- 
ency, it is that unrealized commonwealth of 
philosophers which Plotinus proposed to estab- 
lish ; and if he were to make an almanac, his 
directions to farmers would be something like 
this : " October : Indian Summer ; now is the 
time to get in your early Vedas." What, then, 
is his secret? Is it not that he out-Yankees us 
all ? that his range includes us all ? that he is 
equally at home with the potato-disease and 
original sin, with pegging shoes and the Over- 
Soul ? that, as we try all trades, so has he tried 
all cultures ? and above all, that his mysticism 
gives us a counterpoise to our super-practical- 
ity ? 

There is no man living to whom, as a writer, 
so many of us feel and thankfully acknowledge 
so great an indebtedness for ennobling impulses, 
— none whom so many cannot abide. What 
does he mean? ask these last. Where is his 
system ? What is the use of it all ? What the 
deuse have we to do with Brahma ? I do not 
propose to write an essay on Emerson at this 
time. I will only say that one may find gran- 
deur and consolation in a starlit night without 
caring to ask what it means, save grandeur 
and consolation ; one may like Montaigne, 



278 EMERSON THE LECTURER 

as some ten generations before us have done, 
without thinking him so systematic as some 
more eminently tedious (or shall we say tedi- 
ously eminent ?) authors ; one may think roses 
as good in their way as cabbages, though the 
latter would make a better show in the witness- 
box, if cross-examined as to their usefulness ; 
and as for Brahma, why, he can take care of 
himself, and won't bite us at any rate. 

The bother with Mr. Emerson is, that, 
though he writes in prose, he is essentially a poet. 
If you undertake to paraphrase what he says, 
and to reduce it to words of one syllable for 
infant minds, you will make as sad work of it 
as the good monk with his analysis of Homer 
in the " Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum." We 
look upon him as one of the few men of genius 
whom our age has produced, and there needs 
no better proof of it than his masculine faculty 
of fecundating other minds. Search for his 
eloquence in his books and you will perchance 
miss it, but meanwhile you will find that it has 
kindled all your thoughts. For choice and pith 
of language he belongs to a better age than 
ours, and might rub shoulders with Fuller and 
Browne, — though he does use that abominable 
word reliable. His eye for a fine, telling phrase 
that will carry true is like that of a backwoods- 
man for a rifle ; and he will dredge you up a 
choice word from the mud of Cotton Mather 



EMERSON THE LECTURER 279 

himself. A diction at once so rich and so homely 
as his I know not where to match in these days 
of writing by the page ; it is like homespun 
cloth-of-gold. The many cannot miss his 
meaning, and only the few can find it. It is 
the open secret of all true genius. It is whole- 
some to angle in those profound pools, though 
one be rewarded with nothing more than the 
leap of a fish that flashes his freckled side in 
the sun and as suddenly absconds in the dark 
and dreamy waters again. There is keen excite- 
ment, though there be no ponderable acquisi- 
tion. If we carry nothing home in our baskets, 
there is ample gain in dilated lungs and stimu- 
lated blood. What does he mean, quotha? He 
means inspiring hints, a divining-rod to your 
deeper nature. No doubt, Emerson, like all 
original men, has his peculiar audience, and yet 
I know none that can hold a promiscuous crowd 
in pleased attention so long as he. As in all 
original men, there is something for every pal- 
ate. " Would you know," says Goethe, " the 
ripest cherries ? Ask the boys and the black- 
birds." 

The announcement that such a pleasure as 
a new course of lectures by him is coming, to 
people as old as I am, is something like those 
forebodings of spring that prepare us every year 
for a familiar novelty, none the less novel, when 
it arrives, because it is familiar. We know per- 



28o EMERSON THE LECTURER 

fectly well what we are to expect from Mr. 
Emerson, and yet what he says always pene- 
trates and stirs us, as is apt to be the case with 
genius, in a very unlooked-for fashion. Per- 
haps genius is one of the few things which we 
gladly allow to repeat itself, — one of the few 
that multiply rather than weaken the force of 
their impression by iteration ? Perhaps some of 
us hear more than the mere words, are moved 
by something deeper than the thoughts ? If it 
be so, we are quite right, for it is thirty years 
and more of" plain living and high thinking " 
that speak to us in this altogether unique lav- 
preacher. We have shared in the beneficence 
of this varied culture, this fearless impartiality 
in criticism and speculation, this masculine sin- 
cerity, this sweetness of nature which rather 
stimulates than cloys, for a generation long. If 
ever there was a standing testimonial to the 
cumulative power and value of Character (and 
we need it sadly in these days), we have it in 
this gracious and dignified presence. What an 
antiseptic is a pure life 1 At sixty-five (or two 
years beyond his grand climacteric, as he would 
prefer to call it) he has that privilege of soul 
which abolishes the calendar, and presents him 
to us always the unwasted contemporary of 
his own prime. I do not know if he seem old 
to his younger hearers, but we who have known 
him so long wonder at the tenacity with which 



EMERSON THE LECTURER 281 

he maintains himself even in the outposts of 
youth. I suppose it is not the Emerson of 
1868 to whom we Hsten. For us the whole life 
of the man is distilled in the clear drop of every 
sentence, and behind each word we divine the 
force of a noble character, the weight of a large 
capital of thinking and being. We do not go 
to hear what Emerson says so much as to hear 
Emerson. Not that we perceive any falling- 
ofF in anything that ever was essential to the 
charm of Mr. Emerson's peculiar style of 
thought or phrase. The first lecture, to be sure, 
was more disjointed even than common. It was 
as if, after vainly trying to get his paragraphs 
into sequence and order, he had at last tried 
the desperate expedient of shuffling them. It 
was chaos come again, but it was a chaos full 
of shooting-stars, a jumble of creative forces. 
The second lecture, on "Criticism and Poetry," 
was quite up to the level of old times, full 
of that power of strangely subtle association 
whose indirect approaches startle the mind into 
almost painful attention, of those flashes of mu- 
tual understanding between speaker and hearer 
that are gone ere one can say it lightens. 
The vice of Emerson's criticism seems to be, 
that while no man is so sensitive to what is poet- 
ical, few men are less sensible than he of what 
makes a poem. He values the solid meaning 
of thought above the subtler meaning of style. 



282 EMERSON THE LECTURER 

He would prefer Donne, I suspect, to Spen- 
ser, and sometimes mistakes the queer for the 
original. 

To be young is surely the best, if the most 
precarious, gift of life ; yet there are some of us 
who would hardly consent to be young again, 
if it were at the cost of our recollection of 
Mr. Emerson's first lectures during the con- 
sulate of Van Buren. We used to walk in 
from the country to the Masonic Temple (I think 
it was), through the crisp winter night, and 
listen to that thrilling voice of his, so charged 
with subtle meaning and subtle music, as ship- 
wrecked men on a raft to the hail of a ship that 
came with unhoped-for food and rescue. Cynics 
might say what they liked. Did our own im- 
aginations transfigure dry remainder-biscuit into 
ambrosia ? At any rate, he brought us life^ 
which, on the whole, is no bad thing. Was it 
all transcendentalism ? magic-lantern pictures 
on mist ? As you will. Those, then, were just 
what we wanted. But it was not so. The 
delight and the benefit were that he put us in 
communication with a larger style of thought, 
sharpened our wits with a more pungent phrase, 
gave us ravishing glimpses of an ideal under 
the dry husk of our New Englan'd ; made us 
conscious of the supreme and everlasting origi- 
nality of whatever bit of soul might be in any 
of us ; freed us, in short, from the stocks of 



EMERSON THE LECTURER 283 

prose in which we had sat so long that we 
had grown well-nigh contented in our cramps. 
And who that saw the audience will ever forget 
it, where every one still capable of fire, or long- 
ing to renew in himself the half- forgotten sense 
of it, was gathered ? Those faces, young and 
old, agleam with pale intellectual light, eager 
with pleased attention, flash upon me once 
more from the deep recesses of the years with 
an exquisite pathos. Ah, beautiful young eyes, 
brimming with love and hope, wholly vanished 
now in that other world we call the Past, or 
peering doubtfully through the pensive gloam- 
ing of memory, your light impoverishes these 
cheaper days ! I hear again that rustle of sen- 
sation, as they turned to exchange glances over 
some pithier thought, some keener flash of that 
humor which always played about the horizon 
of his mind like heat-lightning, and it seems 
now like the sad whisper of the autumn leaves 
that are whirling around me. But would my 
picture be complete if I forgot that ample and 

vegete countenance of Mr. R of W , 

— how, from its regular post at the corner of 
the front bench, it turned in ruddy triumph to 
the profaner audience as if he were the inex- 
plicably appointed fugleman of appreciation ? 
I was reminded of him by those hearty cherubs 
in Titian's Assumption that look at you as 
who should say, "Did you ever see a Madonna 



284 EMERSON THE LECTURER 

like that? Did you ever behold one hundred 
and fifty pounds of womanhood mount heaven- 
ward before like a rocket?" 

To some of us that long-past experience 
remains as the most marvellous and fruitful we 
have ever had. Emerson awakened us, saved 
us from the body of this death. It is the sound 
of the trumpet that the young soul longs for, 
careless what breath may fill it. Sidney heard 
it in the ballad of " Chevy Chase," and we in 
Emerson. Nor did it blow retreat, but called 
to us with assurance of victory. Did they say 
he was disconnected ? So were the stars, that 
seemed larger to our eyes, still keen with that 
excitement, as we walked homeward with 
prouder stride over the creaking snow. And 
were they not knit together by a higher logic 
than our mere sense could master ? Were we 
enthusiasts ? I hope and believe we were, and 
am thankful to the man who made us worth 
something for once in our lives. If asked what 
was left ? what we carried home ? we should not 
have been, careful for an answer. It would have 
been enough if we had said that something 
beautiful had passed that way. Or we might 
have asked in return what one brought away 
from a symphony of Beethoven ? Enough that 
he had set that ferment of wholesome discontent 
at work in us. There is one, at least, of those 
old hearers, so many of whom are now in the 



EMERSON THE LECTURER 285 

fruition of that intellectual beauty of which 
Emerson gave them both the desire and the 
foretaste, who will always love to repeat : — 

*♦ Che in la mente m' e fitta, ed or m' accuora 
La cara e buona immagine paterna 
Di voi, quando nel mondo ad ora ad ora 
M' insegnavaste come 1' uom s' eterna." 

I am unconsciously thinking, as I write, of 
the third lecture of the present course, in which 
Mr. Emerson gave some delightful reminis- 
cences of the intellectual influences in whose 
movement he had shared. It was like hearing 
Goethe read some passages of the " Wahrheit 
aus seinem Leben." Not that there was not a 
little Dichtung, too, here and there, as the lec- 
turer built up so lofty a pedestal under certain 
figures as to lift them into a prominence of 
obscurity, and seem to masthead them there. 
Everybody was asking his neighbor who this 
or that recondite great man was, in the faint 
hope that somebody might once have heard of 
him. There are those who call Mr. Emerson 
cold. Let them revise their judgment in pre- 
sence of this loyalty of his that can keep warm 
for half a century, that never forgets a friend- 
ship, or fails to pay even a fancied obligation to 
the uttermost farthing. This substantiation of 
shadows was but incidental, and pleasantly 
characteristic of the man to those who know 
and love him. The greater part of the lecture 



286 EMERSON THE LECTURER 

was devoted to reminiscences of things substan- 
tial in themselves. He spoke of Everett, fresh 
from Greece and Germany ; of Channing ; of 
the translations of Margaret Fuller, Ripley, 
and Dwight ; of the " Dial " and Brook Farm. 
To what he said of the latter an undertone of 
good-humored irony gave special zest. But 
what every one of his hearers felt was that the 
protagonist in the drama was left out. The lec- 
turer was no Tineas to babble the quorum magna 
■pars fui^ and, as one of his listeners, I cannot 
help wishing to say how each of them was com- 
menting the story as it went along, and filling 
up the necessary gaps in it from his own private 
store of memories. His younger hearers could 
not know how much they owed to the benign 
impersonality, the quiet scorn of everything 
ignoble, the never-sated hunger of self-culture, 
that were personified in the man before them. 
But the older knew how much the country's in- 
tellectual emancipation was due to the stimulus 
of his teaching and example, how constantly he 
had kept burning the beacon of an ideal life 
above our lower region of turmoil. To him 
more than to all other causes together did the 
young martyrs of our civil war owe the sustain- 
ing strength of thoughtful heroism that is so 
touching in every record of their lives. Those 
who are grateful to Mr. Emerson, as many of 
us are, for what they feel to be most valuable 



EMERSON THE LECTURER 287 

in their culture, or perhaps I should say their 
impulse, are grateful not so much for any direct 
teachings of his as for that inspiring lift which 
only genius can give, and without which all doc- 
trine is chaff. 

This was something like the caret which some 
of us older boys wished to fill up on the margin 
of the master's lecture. Few men have been so 
much to so many, and through so large a range 
of aptitudes and temperaments, and this simply 
because all of us value manhood beyond any or 
all other qualities of character. We may sus- 
pect in him, here and there, a certain thinness 
and vagueness of quality, but let the waters go 
over him as they list, this masculine fibre of his 
will keep its lively color and its toughness of 
texture. I have heard some great speakers and 
some accomplished orators, but never any that 
so moved and persuaded men as he. There is 
a kind of undertow in that rich baritone of his 
that sweeps our' minds from their foothold into 
deeper waters with a drift we cannot and would 
not resist. And how artfully (for Emerson is 
a long-studied artist in these things) does the 
deliberate utterance, that seems waiting for 
the fit word, appear to admit us partners in the 
labor of thought and make us feel as if the 
glance of humor were a sudden suggestion, as 
if the perfect phrase lying written there on the 
desk were as unexpected to him as to us ! In 



288 EMERSON THE LECTURER 

that closely filed speech of his at the Burns 
centenary dinner, every word seemed to have 
just dropped down to him from the clouds. 
He looked far away over the heads of his 
hearers, with a vague kind of expectation, as 
into some private heaven of invention, and the 
winged period came at last obedient to his spell. 
" My dainty Ariel ! " he seemed murmuring to 
himself as he cast down his eyes as if in depre- 
cation of the frenzy of approval and caught 
another sentence from the Sibylline leaves that 
lay before him, ambushed behind a dish of fruit 
and seen only by nearest neighbors. Every 
sentence brought down the house, as I never 
saw one brought down before, — and it is not 
so easy to hit Scotsmen with a sentiment that 
has no hint of native brogue in it. I watched, 
for it was an Interesting study, how the quick 
sympathy ran flashing from face to face down 
the long tables, like an electric spark thrilling 
as it went, and then exploded in a thunder of 
plaudits. I watched till tables and faces van- 
ished, for I, too, found myself caught up in 
the common enthusiasm, and my excited fancy 
set me under the bema listening to him who 
fulmined over Greece. I can never help apply- 
ing to him what Ben Jonson said of Bacon: 
" There happened In my time one noble 
speaker, who was full of gravity in his speak- 
ing. His language was nobly censorious. No 



EMERSON THE LECTURER 289 

man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, 
more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less 
idleness, in what he uttered. No member of 
his speech but consisted of his own graces. His 
hearers could not cough, or look aside from 
him, without loss. He commanded where he 
spoke." Those who heard him while their na- 
tures were yet plastic, and their mental nerves 
trembled under the slightest breath of divine 
air, will never ctase to feel and say : — 

*• Was never eye did see that face. 

Was never ear did hear that tongue. 
Was never mind did mind his grace. 
That ever thought the travail long; 
But eyes, and ears, and every thought. 
Were with his sweet perfections caught." 



THOREAU 

1865 

WHAT contemporary, if he was in the 
fighting period of his Hfe (since Na- 
ture sets Hmits about her conscription 
for spiritual fields, as the state does in physical 
warfare), will ever forget what was somewhat 
vaguely called the " Transcendental Move- 
ment " of thirty years ago ? Apparently set astir 
by Carlyle's essays on the Signs of the Times, 
and on History, the final and more immediate 
impulse seemed to be given by " Sartor Resar- 
tus." At least the republication in Boston of 
that wonderful Abraham a Sancta Clara sermon 
on Falstaff 's text of the miserable forked radish 
gave the signal for a sudden mental and moral 
mutiny. Kcce nunc tempus acceptabile ! was 
shouted on all hands with every variety of em- 
phasis, and by voices of every conceivable pitch, 
representing the three sexes of men, women, 
and Lady Mary Wortley Montagues. The 
nameless eagle of the tree Ygdrasil was about 
to sit at last, and wild-eyed enthusiasts rushed 
from all sides, each eager to thrust under the 
mystic bird that chalk egg from which the new 



THOREAU 291 

and fairer Creation was to be hatched in due 
time. Redeunt Saturnia regna^ — so far was cer- 
tain, though in what shape, or by what methods, 
was still a matter of debate. Every possible form 
of intellectual and physical dyspepsia brought 
forth its gospel. Bran had its prc^phets, and the 
presartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs, tail- 
ored impromptu from the tar-pot by incensed 
neighbors, and sent forth to illustrate the " feath- 
ered Mercury," as defined by Webster and 
Worcester. Plainness of speech was carried to 
a pitch that would have taken away the breath 
of George Fox ; and even swearing had its evan- 
gelists, who answered a simple inquiry after their 
health with an elaborate ingenuity of imprecation 
that might have been honorably mentioned by 
Marlborough in general orders. Everybody had 
a mission (with a capital M) to attend to every- 
body else's business. No brain but had its pri- 
vate maggot, which must have found pitiably 
short commons sometimes. Not a few impecu- 
nious zealots abjured the use of money (unless 
earned by other people), professing to live on 
the internal revenues of the spirit. Some had 
an assurance of instant millennium so soon as 
hooks and eyes should be substituted forbuttons. 
Communities were established where everything 
was to be common but common sense. Men 
renounced their old gods, and hesitated only 
whether to bestow their furloughed allegiance 



292 THOREAU 

on Thor or Budh. Conventions were held for 
every hitherto inconceivable purpose. The be- 
lated gift of tongues, as among the Fifth Mon- 
archy men, spread like a contagion, rendering its 
victims incomprehensible to all Christian men; 
whether equally so to the most distant possible 
heathen or not was unexperimented, though 
many would have subscribed liberally that a fair 
trial might be made. It was the pentecost of 
Shinar. The day of utterances reproduced the 
day of rebuses and anagrams, and there was 
nothing so simple that uncial letters and the 
style of Diphilus the Labyrinth could not turn 
it into a riddle. Many foreign revolutionists out 
of work added to the general misunderstanding 
their contribution of broken English in every 
most ingenious form of fracture. All stood ready 
at a moment's notice to reform everything but 
themselves. The general motto was : — 

•*And we'll talk with them, too, 
And take upon 's the mystery of things 
As if we were God's spies." 

Nature is always kind enough to give even 
her clouds a humorous lining. 1 have barely 
hinted at the comic side of the affair, for the 
material was endless. This was the whistle and 
trailing fuse of the shell, but there was a very 
solid and serious kernel, full of the most deadly 
explosiveness. Thoughtful men divined it, but 
the generality suspected nothing. The word 



THOREAU 293 

" transcendental " then was the maid of all work 
for those who could not think, as " Pre-Raph- 
aelite " has been more recently for people of the 
same limited housekeeping. The truth is, that 
there was a much nearer metaphysical relation 
and a much more distant aesthetic and literary 
relation between Carlyle and the Apostles of the 
Newness, as they were called in New England, 
than has commonly been supposed. Both repre- 
sented the reaction and revolt against Philis- 
tereiy a renewal of the old battle begun in modern 
times by Erasmus and Reuchlin, and continued 
by Lessing, Goethe, and, in a far narrower sense, 
by Heine in Germany, and of which Fielding, 
Sterne, and Wordsworth in different ways have 
been the leaders in England. It was simply a 
struggle for fresh air, in which, if the windows 
could not be opened, there was danger that panes 
would be broken, though painted with images 
of saints and martyrs. Light, colored by these 
reverend effigies, was none the more respirable 
for being picturesque. There is only one thing 
better than tradition, and that is the original 
and eternal life out of which all tradition takes 
its rise. It was this life which the reformers 
demanded, with more or less clearness of con- 
sciousness and expression, life in politics, life in 
literature, life in religion. Of what use to im- 
port a gospel from Judsea, if we leave behind the 
soul that made it possible, the God who keeps 



294 THOREAU 

it forever real and present ? Surely Abana and 
Pharpar are better than Jordan, if a living 
faith be mixed with those waters and none with 
these. 

Scotch Presbyterianism as a motive of spirit- 
ual progress v/as dead ; New England Puritan^ 
ism was in like manner dead; in other words. 
Protestantism had made its fortune and no 
longer protested ; but till Carlyle spoke out in 
the Old World and Emerson in the New, no 
one had dared to proclaim, Le roi est mort : 
vive le roi ! The meaning of which proclama- 
tion was essentially this : the vital spirit has long 
since departed out of this form once so kingly, 
and the great seal has been in commission long 
enough ; but meanwhile the soul of man, from 
which all power emanates and to which it reverts, 
still survives in undiminished royalty ; God still 
survives, little as you gentlemen of the Commis- 
sion seem to be aware of it, — nay, will possibly 
outlive the whole of you, incredible as it may 
appear. The truth is, that both Scotch Presby- 
terianism and New England Puritanism made 
their new avatar in Carlyle and Emerson, the 
heralds of their formal decease, and the tend- 
ency of the one toward Authority and of the 
other toward Independency might have been 
prophesied by whoever had studied history. The 
necessity was not so much in the men as in the 
principles they represented and the traditions 



THOREAU 295 

which overruled them. The Puritanism of the 
past found its unwilling poet in Hawthorne, the 
rarest creative imagination of the century, the 
rarest in some ideal respects since Shakespeare ; 
but the Puritanism that cannot die, the Puritan- 
ism that made New England what it is, and is 
destined to make America what it should be, 
found its voice in Emerson. Though holding 
himself aloof from all active partnership in 
movements of reform, he has been the sleeping 
partner who has supplied a great part of their 
capital. 

The artistic range of Emerson is narrow, as 
every well-read critic must feel at once ; and 
so is that of iEschylus, so is that of Dante, so 
is that of Montaigne, so is that of Schiller, so is 
that of nearly every one except Shakespeare ; 
but there is a gauge of height no less than of 
breadth, of individuality as well as of compre- 
hensiveness, and, above all, there is the stand- 
ard of genetic power, the test of the masculine 
as distinguished from the receptive minds. There 
are staminate plants in literature that make no 
fine show of fruit, but without whose pollen, 
quintessence of fructifying gold, the garden had 
been barren. Emerson's mind is emphatically 
one of these, and there is no man to whom our 
aesthetic culture owes so much. The Puritan 
revolt had made us ecclesiastically and the 
Revolution politically independent, but we were 



296 THOREAU 

still socially and intellectually moored to Eng- 
lish thought, till Emerson cut the cable and 
gave us a chance at the dangers and the glories of 
blue water. No man young enough to have felt 
it can forget or cease to be grateful for the men- 
tal and moral nudge which he received from the 
writings of his high-minded and brave-spirited 
countryman. That we agree with him, or that 
he always agrees with himself, is aside from the 
question ; but that he arouses in us something 
that we are the better for having awakened, 
whether that something be of opposition or as- 
sent, that he speaks always to what is highest 
and least selfish in us, few Americans of the 
generation younger than his own would be dis- 
posed to deny. His oration before the Phi Beta 
Kappa Society at Cambridge, some thirty years 
ago, was an event without any former parallel 
in our literary annals, a scene to be always trea- 
sured in the memory for its picturesqueness and 
its inspiration. What crowded and breathless 
aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, 
what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence 
of foregone dissent ! It was our Yankee version 
of a lecture by Abelard, our Harvard parallel to 
the last public appearances of Schelling. 

I said that the Transcendental Movement 
was the protestant spirit of Puritanism seeking a 
new outlet and an escape from forms and creeds 
which compressed rather than expressed it. In 



THOREAU 297 

its motives, its preaching, and its results, it dif- 
fered radically from the doctrine of Carlyle. The 
Scotchman, with all his genius, and his humor 
gigantesque as that of Rabelais, has grown 
shriller and shriller with years, degenerating 
sometimes into a common scold, and emptying 
very unsavory vials of wrath on the head of 
the sturdy British Socrates of worldly common 
sense. The teaching of Emerson tended much 
more exclusively to self-culture and the inde- 
pendent development of the individual man. 
It seemed to many almost Pythagorean in its 
voluntary seclusion from commonwealth affairs. 
Both Carlyle and Emerson were disciples of 
Goethe, but Emersoh in a far truer sense ; and 
while the one, from his bias toward the eccentric, 
has degenerated more and more into mannerism, 
the other has clarified steadily toward perfection 
of style, — exquisite fineness of material, unob- 
trusive lowness of tone and simplicity of fashion, 
the most high-bred garb of expression. What- 
ever may be said of his thought, nothing can be 
finer than the delicious limpidness of his phrase. 
If it was ever questionable whether democracy 
could develop a gentleman, the problem has been 
affirmatively solved at last. Carlyle, in his cyni- 
cism and his admiration of force in and for itself, 
has become at last positively inhuman ; Emer- 
son, reverencing strength, seeking the highest 
outcome of the individual, has found that society 



298 THOREAU 

and politics are also main elements in the attain- 
ment of the desired end, and has drawn steadily 
manward and worldward. The two men repre- 
sent respectively those grand personifications 
in the drama of i^schylus, Bta and Kparo?. 

Among the pistillate plants kindled to fruitage 
by the Emersonian pollen, Thoreau is thus far 
the most remarkable ; and it is something emi- 
nently fitting that his posthumous works should 
be offered us by Emerson, for they are straw- 
berries from his own garden. A singular mixture 
of varieties, indeed, there is ; — alpine, some of 
them, with the flavor of rare mountain air; others 
wood, tasting of sunny roadside banks or shy 
openings in the forest ; and not a few seedlings 
swollen hugely by culture, but lacking the fine 
natural aroma of the more modest kinds. Strange 
books these are of his, and interesting in many 
ways, — instructive chiefly as showing how con- 
siderable a crop may be raised on a compara- 
tively narrow close of mind, and how much a 
man may make of his life if he will assiduously 
follow it, though perhaps never truly finding it 
at last. 

I have just been renewing my recollection of 
Mr. Thoreau's writings, and have read through 
his six volumes in the order of their production. 
I shall try to give an adequate report of their 
impression upon me both as critic and as mere 
reader. He seems to me to have been a man 



THOREAU 299 

with so high a conceit of himself that he accepted 
without questioning, and insisted on our accept- 
ing, his defects and wealcnesses of character as 
virtues and powers peculiar to himself. Was he 
indolent, he finds none of the activities which 
attract or employ the rest of mankind worthy 
of him. Was he wanting in the qualities that 
make success, it is success that is contemptible, 
and not himself that lacks persistency and pur- 
pose. Was he poor, money was an unmixed 
evil. Did his life seem a selfish one, he con- 
demns doing good as one of the weakest of 
superstitions. To be of use was with him the 
most killing bait of the wily tempter Useless- 
ness. He had no faculty of generalization from 
outside of himself, or at least no experience 
which would supply the material of such, and 
he makes his own whim the law, his own range 
the horizon of the universe. He condemns a 
world, the hollowness of whose satisfactions 
he had never had the means of testing, and 
we recognize Apemantus behind the mask of 
Timon. He had little active imagination ; of 
the receptive he had much. His appreciation is 
of the highest quality ; his critical power, from 
want of continuity of mind, very limited and 
inadequate. He somewhere cites a simile from 
Ossian, as an example of the superiority of 
the old poetry to the new, though, even were 
the historic evidence less convincing, the senti- 



300 THOREAU 

mental melancholy of those poems should be 
conclusive of their modernness. He had none 
of the artistic mastery which controls a great 
work to the serene balance of completeness, but 
exquisite mechanical skill in the shaping of sen- 
tences and paragraphs, or (more rarely) short 
bits of verse for the expression of a detached 
thought, sentiment, or image. His works give 
one the feeling of a sky full of stars, — some- 
thing impressive and exhilarating certainly, 
something high overhead and freckled thickly 
with spots of isolated brightness ; but whether 
these have any mutual relation with each other, 
or have any concern with our mundane matters, 
is for the most part matter of conjecture, — as- 
trology as yet, and not astronomy. 

It is curious, considering what Thoreau after- 
wards became, that he was not by nature an 
observer. He only saw the things he looked 
for, and was less poet than naturalist. Till he 
built his Walden shanty, he did not know that 
the hickory grew in Concord. Till he went to 
Maine, he had never seen phosphorescent wood, 
a phenomenon early familiar to most country 
boys. At forty he speaks of the seeding of 
the pine as a new discovery, though one should 
have thought that its gold-dust of blowing 
pollen might have earlier drawn his eye. Nei- 
ther his attention nor his genius was of the 
spontaneous kind. He discovered nothing. 



THOREAU 301 

He thought everything a discovery of his own, 
from moonlight to the planting of acorns and 
nuts by squirrels. This is a defect in his char- 
acter, but one of his chief charms as a writer. 
Everything grows fresh under his hand. He 
delved in his mind and nature ; he planted 
them with all manner of native and foreign 
seeds, and reaped assiduously. He was not 
merely solitary, he would be isolated, and suc- 
ceeded at last in almost persuading himself that 
he was autochthonous. He valued everything 
in proportion as he fancied it to be exclusively 
his own. He complains in " Walden " that 
there is no one in Concord with whom he could 
talk of Oriental literature, though the man 
was living within two miles of his hut who 
had introduced him to it. This intellectual 
selfishness becomes sometimes almost painful 
in reading him. He lacked that generosity of 
" communication " which Johnson admired in 
Burke. De Quincey tells us that Wordsworth 
was impatient when any one else spoke of 
mountains, as if he had a peculiar property 
in them. And we can readily understand why it 
should be so : no one is satisfied with another's 
appreciation of his mistress. But Thoreau 
seems to have prized a lofty way of thinking 
(often we should be inclined to call it a remote 
one) not so much because it was good in itself 
as because he wished few to share it with 



302 THOREAU 

him. It seems now and then as if he did not 
seek to lure others up "above our lower region 
of turmoil," but to leave his own name cut on 
the mountain peak as the first climber. This 
itch of originality infects his thought and style. 
To be misty is not to be mystic. He turns 
commonplaces end for end, and fancies it makes 
something new of them. As we walk down 
Park Street, our eye is caught by Dr. Winship's 
dumb-bells, one of which bears an inscription 
testifying that it is the heaviest ever put up at 
arm's length by any athlete ; and in reading 
Mr. Thoreau's books we cannot help feeling 
as if he sometimes invited our attention to a 
particular sophism or paradox as the biggest 
yet maintained by any single writer. He seeks, 
at all risks, for perversity of thought, and re- 
vives the age of concetti while he fancies himself 
going back to a pre-classical nature. " A day," 
he says, " passed in the society of those Greek 
sages, such as described in the ' Banquet ' of 
Xenophon, would not be comparable with the 
dry wit of decayed cranberry-vines and the fresh 
Attic salt of the moss-beds." It is not so much 
the True that he loves as the Out-of-the-Way. 
As the Brazen Age shows itself in other men by 
exaggeration of phrase, so in him by extrava- 
gance of statement. He wishes always to trump 
your suit and to ruff when you least expect it. 
Do you love Nature because she is beautiful ? 



THOREAU 303 

He will find a better argument In her ugliness. 
Are you tired of the artificial man ? He in- 
stantly dresses you up an ideal in a Penobscot 
Indian, and attributes to this creature of his 
otherwise-mindedness as peculiarities things 
that are common to all woodsmen, white or 
red, and this simply because he has not studied 
the pale-faced variety. 

This notion of an absolute originality, as 
if one could have a patent-right in it, is an ab- 
surdity. A man cannot escape in thought, any 
more than he can in language, from the past 
and the present. As no one ever invents a 
word, and yet language somehow grows by 
general contribution and necessity, so it is with 
thought, Mr. Thoreau seems to me to insist 
in public on going back to flint and steel, when 
there is a match-box in his pocket which he 
knows very well how to use at a pinch. Origi- 
nality consists in power of digesting and assimi- 
lating thoughts, so that they become part of 
our life and substance. Montaigne, for ex- 
ample, is one of the most original of authors, 
though he helped himself to ideas in every di- 
rection. But they turn to blood and coloring 
in his style, and give a freshness of complexion 
that is forever charming. In Thoreau much 
seems yet to be foreign and unassimllated, 
showing itself in symptoms of indigestion. A 
preacher-up of Nature, we now and then detect 



304 THOREAU 

under the surly and stoic garb something of the 
sophist and the sentimentaHzer. I am far from 
implying that this was conscious on his part. 
But it is much easier for a man to impose on 
himself when he measures only with himself. A 
greater familiarity with ordinary men would have 
done Thoreau good, by showing him how many 
fine qualities are common to the race. The 
radical vice of his theory of life was that he 
confounded physical with spiritual remoteness 
from men. A man is far enough withdrawn 
from his fellows if he keep himself clear of their 
weaknesses. He is not so truly withdrawn as 
exiled, if he refuse to share in their strength. 
" Solitude," says Cowley, " can be well fitted 
and set right but upon a very few persons. 
They must have enough knowledge of the 
world to see the vanity of it, and enough virtue 
to despise all vanity." It is a morbid self-con- 
sciousness that pronounces the world of men 
empty and worthless before trying it, the in- 
stinctive evasion of one who is sensible of some 
innate weakness, and retorts the accusation of 
it before any has made it but himself To a 
healthy mind, the world is a constant chal- 
lenge of opportunity. Mr. Thoreau had not a 
healthy mind, or he would not have been so 
fond of prescribing. His whole life was a 
search for the doctor. The old mystics had a 
wiser sense of what the world was worth. They 



THOREAU 305 

ordained a severe apprenticeship to law, and 
even ceremonial, in order to the gaining of 
freedom and mastery over these. Seven years 
of service for Rachel were to be rewarded at 
last with Leah. Seven other years of faithful- 
ness with her were to win them at last the true 
bride of their souls. Active Life was with them 
the only path to the Contemplative. 

Thoreau had no humor, and this implies that 
he was a sorry logician. Himself an artist in 
rhetoric, he confounds thought with style when 
he undertakes to speak of the latter. He was 
forever talking of getting away from the world, 
but he must be always near enough to it, nay, 
to the Concord corner of it, to feel the impres- 
sion he makes there. He verifies the shrewd 
remark of Sainte-Beuve, " On touche encore a 
son temps et tres-fort, meme quand on le re- 
pousse." This egotism of his is a Stylites pil- 
lar after all, a seclusion which keeps him in the 
public eye. The dignity of man is an excellent 
thing, but therefore to hold one's self too sacred 
and precious is the reverse of excellent. There 
is something delightfully absurd in six volumes 
addressed to a world of such " vulgar fellows " as 
Thoreau affirmed his fellow men to be. I once 
had a glimpse of a genuine solitary who spent 
his winters one hundred and fifty miles beyond 
all human communication, and there dwelt with 
his rifle as his only confidant. Compared with 



3o6 THOREAU 

this, the shanty on Walden Pond has something 
the air, it must be confessed, of the Hermitage of 
La Chevrette. I do not believe that the way 
to a true cosmopolitanism carries one into the 
woods or the society of musquashes. Perhaps 
the narrowest provincialism is that of Self; that 
of Kleinwinkel is nothing to it. The natural 
man, like the singing birds, comes out of the for- 
est as inevitably as the natural bear and the wild- 
cat stick there. To seek to be natural implies a 
consciousness that forbids all naturalness forever. 
It is as easy — and no easier — to be natural in 
a salon as in a swamp, if one do not aim at it, 
for what we call unnaturalness always has its 
spring in a man's thinking too much about 
himself. " It is impossible," said Turgot, " for 
a vulgar man to be simple." 

I look upon a great deal of the modern sen- 
timentalism about Nature as a mark of disease. 
It is one more symptom of the general liver- 
complaint. To a man of wholesome constitution 
the wilderness is well enough for a mood or a 
vacation, but not for a habit of life. Those who 
have most loudly advertised their passion for 
seclusion and their intimacy with Nature, from 
Petrarch down, have been mostly sentimental- 
ists, unreal men, misanthropes on the spindle 
side, solacing an uneasy suspicion of themselves 
by professing contempt for their kind. They 
make demands on the world in advance propor- 



THOREAU 307 

tioned to their inward measure of their own 
merit, and are angry that the world pays only by 
the visible measure of performance. It is true 
of Rousseau, the modern founder of the sect, 
true of Saint Pierre, his intellectual child, and 
of Chateaubriand, his grandchild, the inventor, 
we might almost say, of the primitive forest, and 
who first was touched by the solemn falling of 
a tree from natural decay in the windless silence 
of the woods. It is a very shallow view that 
affirms trees and rocks to be healthy, and can- 
not see that men in communities are just as true 
to the laws of their organization and destiny ; 
that can tolerate the puffin and the fox, but not 
the fool and the knave ; that would shun pol- 
itics because of its demagogues, and snuff up 
the stench of the obscene fungus. The divine 
life of Nature is more wonderful, more various, 
more sublime in man than in any other of her 
works, and the wisdom that is gained by com- 
merce with men, as Montaigne and Shakespeare 
gained it, or with one's own soul among men, 
as Dante, is the most delightful, as it is the 
most precious, of all. In outward nature it is 
still man that interests us, and we care far less 
for the things seen than the way in which they 
are seen by poetic eyes like Wordsworth's or 
Thoreau's, and the reflections they cast there. 
To hear the to-do that is often made over 



3o8 THOREAU 

the simple fact that a man sees the image of 
himself in the outward world, one is reminded 
of a savage when he for the first time catches a 
glimpse of himself in a looking-glass. " Vener- 
able child of Nature," we are tempted to say, 
" to whose science in the invention of the to- 
bacco-pipe, to whose art in the tattooing of thine 
undegenerate hide not yet enslaved by tailors, 
we are slowly striving to climb back, the miracle 
thou beholdest is sold in my unhappy country 
for a shilling!" If matters go on as they have 
done, and everybody must needs blab of all the 
favors that have been done him by roadside and 
rIver-brInk and woodland walk, as if to kiss and 
tell were no longer treachery, it will be a positive 
refreshment to meet a man who is as superbly 
indifferent to Nature as she is to him. By and 
by we shall have John Smith, of No. —12 —12th 
Street, advertising that he is not the J. S. who 
saw a cow-lily on Thursday last, as he never saw 
one in his life, would not see one if he could, 
and is prepared to prove an alibi on the day in 
question. 

Solitary communion with Nature does not 
seem to have been sanitary or sweetening in its 
influence on Thoreau's character. On the con- 
trary, his letters show him more cynical as he grew 
older. While he studied with respectful atten- 
tion the minks and woodchucks, his neighbors, 



THOREAU 309 

he looked with utter contempt on the august 
drama of destiny of which his country was the 
scene, and on which the curtain had already 
risen. He w^as converting us back to a state of 
nature " so eloquently," as Voltaire said of Rous- 
seau, " that he almost persuaded us to go on 
all fours," while the wiser fates were making it 
possible for us to walk erect for the first time. 
Had he conversed more with his fellows, his 
sympathies would have widened with the assur- 
ance that his peculiar genius had more apprecia- 
tion, and his writings a larger circle of readers, 
or at least a warmer one, than he dreamed of 
We have the highest testimony ' to the natural 
sweetness, sincerity, and nobleness of his tem- 
per, and in his books an equally irrefragable one 
to the rare quality of his mind. He was not a 
strong thinker, but a sensitive feeler. Yet his 
mind strikes us as cold and wintry in its purity. 
A light snow has fallen everywhere in which he 
seems to come on the track of the shier sensa- 
tions that would elsewhere leave no trace. We 
think greater compression would have done 
more for his fame. A feeling of sameness comes 
over us as we read so much. Trifles are recorded 
with an over-minute punctuality and conscien- 
tiousness of detail. He registers the state of his 
personal thermometer thirteen times a day. We 

' Mr. Emerson, in the Biographical Sketch prefixed to the 
Excursions. 



310 THOREAU 

cannot help thinking sometimes of the man 
who 

*< Watches, starves, freezes, and sweats — 
To learn but catechisms and alphabets 
Of unconcerning things, matters of fact," 

and sometimes of the saying of the Persian poet, 
that " when the owl would boast, he boasts of 
catching mice at the edge of a hole." We could 
readily part with some of his affectations. It 
was well enough for Pythagoras to say, once 
for all, " When I was Euphorbus at the siege 
of Troy " ; not so well for Thoreau to travesty 
it into " When I was a shepherd on the plains 
of Assyria." A naive thing said over again is 
anything but naive. But with every exception, 
there is no writing comparable with Thoreau's 
in kind, that is comparable with it in degree 
where it is best ; where it disengages itself, that 
is, from the tangled roots and dead leaves of a 
second-hand Orientalism, and runs limpid and 
smooth and broadening as it runs, a mirror for 
whatever is grand and lovely in both worlds. 

George Sand says neatly, that " Art is not 
a study of positive reality " [actuality were the 
fitter word), " but a seeking after ideal truth." 
It would be doing very inadequate justice to 
Thoreau if we left it to be inferred that this 
ideal element did not exist in him, and that too 
in larger proportion, if less obtrusive, than his 
nature-worship. He took nature as the moun- 



THOREAU 311 

tain-path to an ideal world. If the path wind 
a good deal, if he record too faithfully every trip 
over a root, if he botanize somewhat weari- 
somely, he gives us now and then superb out- 
looks from some jutting crag, and brings us out 
at last into an illimitable ether, where the breath- 
ing is not difficult for those who have any true 
touch of the climbing spirit. His shanty-life 
was a mere impossibility, so far as his own con- 
ception of it goes, as an entire independency of 
mankind. The tub of Diogenes had a sounder 
bottom. Thoreau's experiment actually presup- 
posed all that complicated civilization which it 
theoretically abjured. He squatted on another 
man's land ; he borrows an axe ; his boards, 
his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his books, his 
lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe, all 
turn state's evidence against him as an accom- 
plice in the sin of that artificial civilization which 
rendered it possible that such a person as Henry 
D. Thoreau should exist at all. Magnis tamen 
excidit ausis. His aim was a noble and a useful 
one, in the direction of " plain living and high 
thinking." It was a practical sermon on Em- 
erson's text that "things are in the saddle and 
ride mankind," an attempt to solve Carlyle's pro- 
blem (condensed from Johnson) of " lessening 
your denominator." His whole life was a rebuke 
of the waste and aimlessness of our American 
luxury, which is an abject enslavement to tawdry 



312 THOREAU 

upholstery. He had " fine translunary things " 
in him. His better style as a writer is in keep- 
ing with the simplicity and purity of his life. 
We have said that his range was narrow, but to 
be a master is to be a master. He had caught 
his English at its living source, among the poets 
and prose-writers of its best days ; his literature 
was extensive and recondite ; his quotations are 
always nuggets of the purest ore : there are sen- 
tences of his as perfect as anything in the lan- 
guage, and thoughts as clearly crystallized ; his 
metaphors and images are always fresh from the 
soil ; he had watched Nature like a detective 
who is to go upon the stand ; as we read him, 
it seems as if all-out-of-doors had kept a diary 
and become its own Montaigne ; we look at the 
landscape as in a Claude Lorraine glass ; com- 
pared with his, all other books of similar aim, 
even White's " Selborne," seem dry as a country 
clergyman's meteorological journal in an old 
almanac. He belongs with Donne and Browne 
and Novalis ; if not with the originally creative 
men, with the scarcely smaller class who are 
peculiar, and whose leaves shed their invisible 
thought-seed like ferns.. 



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